Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer up on stage first thing at the D6 conference, and by doing so let them set the agenda for the operating system discussion here at the show. They didn't do a great job of capitalizing on that position. Rather, they left a lot of room for other companies to excite the audience with newer ideas.
G.ho.st
There are two companies here to take on that charge. The first, G.ho.st, demo'd Wednesday. It's a "virtual computer," as the company calls it. Hosted at Amazon Web Services, it's designed to be everything you need from a computer, except it's not on your computer. You get a file system (with 5GB of storage for free), a media player, and links to some apps. For example, if you want to edit a word processing file, you can launch it into Thinkfree or Zoho.
The fact that G.ho.st doesn't come with a bunch of its own apps is the key to this product, and what makes more like an actual OS than many other Web-based OS experiments I've seen. The design goal of G.ho.st is that it acts as the clearinghouse for all your Web app accounts, letting you shuffle data between them. For example, if you have a document in Zoho Writer and want to edit it in Google Docs, G.ho.st will make the transition automatic . If you want to drag a file from your Flickr account into your G.ho.st file store, and later to an email, G.ho.st will do that, too.
The interface for all of this runs within a browser, and that's the only place it will work at first. There's no offline version, and one of the venture funders for the company said the team doesn't believe that online/offline synchronizing will work with typically forgetful users (although a company spokesperson later told me they're considering talking to Sharpcast to offer sync capability). G.ho.st is being built to be the one true glue that holds all your online apps together.
Also, G.ho.st is cool since it's a Palestinian/Israeli collaboration.
The company plans to make money through affiliate deals for the services it links to.
Answering the obvious question -- how do you change user behavior to get them to move their computing to the cloud? -- the founders respond that users have already moved their e-mail behavior online. So it could happen to productivity as well.
Like many other Web-based operating systems, it's a compelling demo but a confusing marketing pitch. The "you don't need your own computer" line doesn't work all that well when everyone has their own laptop already. G.ho.st is a very long bet. It is not a product for today (and it's still in early alpha testing anyway), but it is one of the most interesting Webtops I've seen, and more OS-like than most.
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