Every few years some new technological framework comes along to challenge Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop. Since the advent of the Internet, Microsoft has managed to fight off Netscape (IE), Java (.Net), application service providers (Hotmail), remote process calls (SOAP), and U.S. antitrust law (Bush).
OK, I’m waving my hands here. Not all these things are comparable, obviously, even putting politics and law (social code) aside. This article by Elwyn Jenkins at Microdot News (Why Microsoft Must Compete with the Google Operating System) makes an interesting case that Google is putting together what the author calls a knowledge operating system, or KOS:
A KOS handles the storage and retrieval of information organized [such] that knowledge can be built using both the storage and retrieval mechanisms…. Having purchased Pyra a little over eight weeks ago, Google has in place the core components. Using a browser, a knowledge worker can create information pages organized into reverse chronological order and save these as a blog. Through the fact that a blog is an organized and regular way of storing web pages, Googlebot has a good chance of discovering and indexing these pages very close to the time they were created. Through careful wording of the blog titles and other fields, a blogger can greatly influence the way that page is represented in the Google Database. Using a free site search tool from Google, I can also now retrieve the information using keywords and full-text searching for that information the knowledge worker stored.