"We've cut the head off the operating-system chicken," said Paul Harapin, managing director for Australia and New Zealand, at EMC's Inform event in Darling Harbour, Sydney this week. The operating system "is dead. Microsoft have bigger problems now."
Harapin was referring to how virtualisation has reduced the importance of desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows by separating applications from the operating system layer. Writing applications for a specific operating system is expensive and software vendors are instead writing applications to run in a virtualised environment or as a service.
Supporting applications for an operating system goes away if I distribute my software as a virtual service, said Harapin. "You've taken one layer out of the integration. If my business is operating systems, what purpose does it serve any more?"
In the future companies would view their software as an appliance, said Harapin. Just as a manufacturer took responsibility for its hardware appliances to function properly, so would software vendors for their applications.
Harapin said that VMware's vSphere was a broader operating system "for whole data centres". "Applications don't have to be written for the operating system.
"Things like operating systems will end when we come out of this transformation," Harapin said. However, he noted that it took "most of the 90s" for companies to transition from mainframes to micro-computers.
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