I want to interact with my computer in a fundamentally different way. The desktop metaphor is dead; a generation of children have grown up never working with the physical objects that the virtual desktop represents. What I really want is a modernized Plan 9, a software platform that’s designed from the ground up for our networked, distributed world. If you try to placate me with the assertion that the Web is this new operating system I will become violent.
I want better software: more usable, more accessible, more open, more secure, more integrated, more seamless. I want a better software development experience. I want better programming languages with better development toolkits. Fundamentally, I want better abstractions for the same computation I can do today with all that lovely hardware.
Sometimes I feel like software innovation stopped in the 80’s. Alex articulates this thought better than I.
(via thegongshow)
I completely echo Alex’ sentiment, but I add one further point, and one we didn’t openly acknowledge until two weeks ago: We know that platform has to be networked, but it also has to be generative: tinkerable, hackable, open to innovation directly from the platform. Steve Jobs has laid out his vision of what software can be, and while it certainly improves on many of the metaphors of computing, it’s a huge step back to the completely managed, completely vendor/operator reliant computing of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Plan 9 vision was one of an open, networked, generative computing that made sense in a modern context. Lets not agree we need to start over and find that our new environment is an innovation prison.
