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If they were focusing in that part, I think the revenue sharing + cloud combo could open totally new opportunities that would also justify the investment in a custom OS. I'm thinking of something like a return to the Unix philosophy. Piping together stuff from grep to cat to whatever is pretty great, but mostly only useful if you're dealing with text-ish files. We don't have much in the way of small tools that would be similarly designed for being chained together, but which would work well for say video files. In part because you'd want better OS-level support for that kind of information sharing (though maybe on 'nix you could just pipe stuff from one application to another?), but also to a large part because you'd need to have people making tools that didn't do much by their own and then convince users to download them and build stuff out of them. And telling people to "download this program which doesn't do much by itself, but which is useful if you download some other programs and then combine them" is hard. People want to minimize the amount of hassle, so mostly people bundle lots of different features into a single application that you can just download once. On the other hand, if you had a platform where everything ran in the cloud, and there was no need to separately buy, install, or download things... if any application could call any other application made for the platform, then you could just start making your little specialized programs and making them available for anyone else to use. Any user might chain several of them together, or a programmer making their own application could use them as part of their application, maybe as easily as calling a library. That could open up huge possibilities. With the revenue sharing, there would even be a financial incentive for people to make small tools that were maximally useful for everyone, even if they mostly remained invisible for normal end-users. That said, I'm seeing nothing in Solu's public presentation suggesting that they'd have thought of this angle, or would be invested in it. Which is a pity. |