The Internet Operating System

The Website Operating Platform - Making Website Ownership Open to Everyone

The first part of the internet revolution was about the majority of the people receiving from the internet - news, information, stock quotes, entertainment. It was a place where the technology companies and a few techies provided useful and mostly free information to the public. The next part must involve participation in a more integrated way. If the internet is ever going to live up to its promise as a productivity tool, or tap into the full resources and talents of the entire population, or become a pervasive place to spend and make money, the tools to create and maintain content will have to become ordinary.

It happened with the PC. The disk operating system provided a platform for developers to deliver useful productive tools - wordprocessors, spreadsheets etc. Almost anyone may purchase and make use of these tools for business, entertainment or whatever use they find talent for. The website operating platform promises to do the same for web hosting. The web operating platform must provide the basic framework for user, security, look, auditing, help, and all low-level or fundamental functions of a website and deliver those features open to any web application or website user to utilize or access.

On realizing the promise of the web, many businesses jumped in. However, by June 2000, 30% of internet traffic was concentrated on the sites of the top ten websites. This is compared to about 200 top sites in early 1995. Instead of reducing the barriers to entry, the internet seemed to be throttling participation and causing consolidation. The resources and tools for maintaining an interesting site are highly technical and can not be mustered or sustained by little players. The shake-out was imminent. Companies fell-out. However, this trend is also slowing down some key developments on the net. For instance, video-conferencing will evolve more slowly as long as everyone wants to do it on the servers of a few big sites. If video-conferencing software were easy to access and install, then small clusters of people or organizations can do this privately within the provisions of their own servers and systems. It does not appear that the big sites benefiting from all the traffic resulting from their superior technical resources desire to provide the tools for their success in an individually acquirable form.

However, these few sites cannot explore and exhaust all the uses of the web. There are poets, musicians, homekeepers, who have talents, potential for useful content and applications such as has not yet been seen. Their ideas and contibutions cannot be stimulated or explored because of the technical barriers. With an operating platform as easy as the one that resides on their desktop, true business and social uses for the net will emerge. Even programmers will benefit because they need not create all the features for their applications themselves. They simply leverage on the features and operating base of the web operating platform. Web applications automatically assume a custom look when installed on a site by leveraging on the existing operating features for look. Web applications will become cheaper.

Web applications are already here. You can purchase an ecommerce application today and set up an on-line store. But then you discover that the successful online stores also have a messageboard and generate other contents to sustain customer interest in their site. If you purchase a messaging and chat application to go with your online store, suddenly there are two levels of authentication and source of requesting information from users as well as two different application look. A central platform is needed to coordinate and install applications so that each developer does not have to rewrite fundamental parts of a web application. If you already have a site with registered users who chat, installing an e-commerce software should not have a separate user system. It should simply install and use the existing user system. The User-Based Virtual Internet Operating System (NetVIOS) as the first WOP promises to deliver this. Such a platform should also be open with easy-to-use API so as to recieve developer support.

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