A VC. TechCrunch. Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010: Danny Sullivan, "The Search Platform: Frie. AllThingsD. The State of the Internet Operating System. I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system“, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program as well as the rationale behind conferences I organize like the Web 2.0 Summit and Web 2.0 Expo, the Where 2.0 Conference, and even the Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo. Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call?
What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? On a standalone computer, operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux manage the machine’s resources, making it possible for applications to focus on the job they do for the user. But wait. Your phone knows where you are. Keep following the plot. It was. Search. State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping th. This post is Part Two of my State of the Internet Operating System. If you haven’t read Part One, you should do so before reading this piece. As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment.
The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards. There are many competing contenders to the Internet Operating System throne. Data is hard to acquire and expensive to maintain.