Can Microsoft / Linux / Apple / Sun Coexist?

My opinion is yes, with some well drawn boundaries. Really, it is not a matter of who wins the desktop market. No, I think it is which group of people feel best with which option. Realistically, I see the desktop market still working out much of this.

I’ve been thinking to myself lately. I’m not pleased with the direction computers are going. Windows still has the monopoly on the operating system, Linux is still too complicated for the average user, and OS X doesn’t have the software array. Why are we doing this?

Here’s a suggestion: a royalty free jointly managed set of standards that computers in general should follow. This would include network protocols (and which ones are used), operating system API calls, etc…

Programs would also be required to run in their own safe subset of memory. Security would be first and foremost, making sure LUA was required. Furthermore, software would only have access to specific locations for modifying data. One would be a repository to save configuration data for all users. The second would be a repository for saving configuration data for a specific user. This could be hooked up to a (reinvisioned) domain system, where a user could sit at another computer, install a piece of software (say, MSN Messenger), and the system would know to download and use the individual user’s configuration data they set up on another computer. To achieve this, programs would be required to identify themselves with a series of indentification fields (GUIDs, whatever). More on that below. [Read the rest]