Is Windows relevant in a Web 2.0 world?
There has already been a lot written about Ray Ozzie's idea for "wiring the web" with a clipboard model for transferring XML data between web pages. I'm willing to accept Marc Canter's opinion that it is really cool. Frankly I don't think we'll know how useful it is until it is really used on a lot of pages. It certainly is one of those classic chicken and egg problems. It doesn't just work all by itself. Pages must be customized to accept it, and there won't be any reason to provide places to paste data until there is data that can be copied.
What I find interesting is why Ozzie thinks this is so important. The best answer I can come up with is that he is trying to prove that Windows will still be relevant after applications largely move from the desktop to web pages. Will Windows be little more than a browser launcher? If a computer came out that just ran a tabbed web browser, would most users even need Windows? Of course, this is a long-term question, but Microsoft moves so slowly that it can pretty much only worry about long-term problems. I think Ozzie's Live Clipboard idea may be just one in a long line of new Windows features that prove that a full desktop operating system is necessary to provide a complete infrastructure for a Web user.
The same analogy keeps suggesting itself to me. What if someone actually invented a flying car that we were all promised would be here by this century? Not only would manufacturers of earthbound cars (read desktop apps) be in serious trouble, but so would the companies that build and maintain roads (read Windows). Why have roads when you just take off from your house and land in a parking lot at your destination? A smart road builder would come up with compelling reasons why people still need roads. You may require somewhere to land your aircar in emergencies, or maybe roads would be places where passengers could change from one aircar to another.
This may seem like a silly analogy, but to tell you the truth I find the live clipboard as conceived by Ozzie a little silly myself. Why can't this just be a built-in function of the browser? Why do we need to modify every page to enable the transfer of specific chunks of data? If it worked without any outside help from the operating system, I might believe it had less to do with proving that an operating system is still relevant.
