Sometimes I'll talk about "rocking". I mean this in both the "rock and roll" as well as "rocking a cradle" OK?
People talk about the Cloud, and specifically, serving entire OSes on the cloud, but no one talks about a Cloud OS. The closest things are Google’s offering of Hey it’s just a web browser with integration is fairly weak, as is VMWare’s Hey this is an enterprise solution thingie. Microsoft research came up with a multi-kernel operating system but it doesn’t appear to go far enough.
On the other hand, people are having to defend the OS itself and why it’s even relevant today. Look at it this way, with 64 bits you can reference every piece of memory on your computer. With 128 bits you can reference every computer in the world. With 128 + 64 = 192 bits you could reference any piece of memory on any computer on the planet.
So when I’m talking about a CloudOS, I’m talking about a microkernel on every CPU (or core) on the planet, linked to every other core. Your phone is connected and logged onto the same “operating system” as your desktop, which is the same as your neighbour’s machine, which is the same as the NSA. Your quad-core machine will run four of them, connected to each other. Your file system is literally every hard drive, flash disk, and other doo-hickeys on the planet. You can use arbitrary displays, keyboards, mice — screw “remote” desktop, the entire world works as a single machine.
So the OS is still relevant. It has the potential to rock technology. The idea is perfect.