[jamesmcintyre]

I immediately recognized this as either inspired from or actually from the same creators of the mercuryos concept https://www.mercuryos.com/. Turns out it's the latter.

I love the Mercury OS concept and think it's design both elegantly and sort of subversively packs a myriad of potentially breakthrough ideas.

I have been stewing with ideas around the same vision for years. The idea of a new type of UI where the UI seams to dematerialize, where you directly manipulate the object in your current context (like multi-touch's direct manipulation but at a higher layer of abstraction powered by deep api integrations, intelligent self-assembling relational graphs, and of course ai). For over a decade I've had this thought "the data becomes the UI" like an emergent UI from whatever given data, task or context you are currently in. When I came across the mercuryos concept I immediately smiled.

Conceptually, strategically and technically there are so many challenges to introducing such a new ux paradigm but I'm very happy to see the mercuryos concept has seemed to evolve to New Computer's Dot and I wish them the best!

For those immediately turning to negative sentiment based on privacy or "it's just a gpt4 wrapper" I can see why that could be the knee-jerk reaction but I wouldn't underestimate a sturdy design-philosophy approach like this one. I'd go as far as to make comparisons to Next Computer's NextStepOS. NextStep introduced so many groundbreaking UX concepts and to a large extent I think their personal computing contemporaries underestimated what potential it packed. And, yes, I know the business model and many other factors played into an inevitable doom for Next Computer but there's belief that Steve Jobs may have never intended for Next to become a dominant computing player and instead knew it'd be an irresistible acquisition target in a latent space of UX innovation. It's possible he saw the next evolution of personal computing UX and hedged his bet on not compromising on it. Yet another comparison could be that NextStepOS needed more cpu, graphics and connectivity power to truly display it's heightened level of UX much in the same way something like Dot or mercuryOS would inherently need to leverage cutting-edge computing to truly enable it's vision (obviously LLM's, Vector DB's, etc).

Ok, I'm done, lol.

[swyx]

for posterity, why did mercuryOS fail?

[dgellow]

I don’t think it failed. From what I understand it was a research project, not an actual product.

See https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289

[hdarshane]

I don't think it ever failed in the sense it never shipped because that was out of scope. It was never meant to be an end-product. It was a concept/case-study. Happy they're finally realising that vision.