The death of the operating system?

  by Andy Ormsby | 06 May 2009 | Permalink | Everything Else, Open Source, Software, Software Business Models

Are we seeing the slow death of the operating system?

Tideway has historically delivered its product as an appliance – that is, an integrated hardware and software solution – with the goal of making the product quick to deploy and reducing the pain associated with supporting our software on a relatively uncontrolled range of hardware and operating system configurations. We just have to deal with one hardware configuration, one operating system, and one version of that system.

With the growing popularity of virtualization, we have gone one step further and provided a “virtual appliance” as an alternative to the physical box. This is a virtual machine image that runs under VMware ESX and reduces the time that it takes to deploy our product still further, at least for those customers that have VMware in house and some spare capacity.

Tideway is hardly unique in this approach. At the time of writing, there are 1121 virtual appliances listed on the VMware website.

Many of the virtual appliances have come from a similar background to Tideway’s in the sense that the virtual appliance is a substitute for a physical box that the vendor sells (or used to sell).

While substituting virtual for physical hardware may have been the starting point, increasingly it is pure software products that are being delivered in this way.

IBM’s recent announcement of its “WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition” is a nice illustration of the changing landscape.

Hardware appliances and virtual appliances alike both remove the choice of operating system from the customer; they just get what the vendor supplies.

If IBM’s announcement is an accurate indication of the future, operating systems will move further towards commoditization. They will remain important, but perhaps the choice of operating system will be taken away from the end customer as the OS becomes just a necessary part of a virtual appliance. And if Linux is cheaper than Windows, perhaps Linux is the winner.