The phrase 'internet as an operating system' was coined by people who began viewing the OS as irrelevant, which it isn't. Although the web and browser enable you to access a lot of applications, you still need an operating system for all the everyday things such as file management, non-browser applications, and drivers for hardware - what you have in the operating system limits what you can do.

Open source allows users to break free of certain boundaries and gives them scope for competitive advantage. Ultimately, it's the only reason that the internet could exist, as individual companies have historically fought to control whatever network sprung up through their own incompatible hardware and software.

Whatever the big players tell you, the internet and open source software are yoked together. They're dramatically accelerating the growth of each other but it's simply wrong to view them as a unified system.

....fast forward to December 2008 and here I am playing with Google Chrome, the newly touted (by some at least) operating system for the web. Well, not quite.

It's true that even without the neat features of Chrome (off-line processing, desktop icons and compiled versus interpreted runtime) the underlying operating system on the piece of hardware you use has become much less relevant in the last 10 years. This is especially true of the last 2 years as hoards of people make the transition from desktop applications to subscription based web applications.

Chrome further blurs the visible boundaries between the underlying OS and applications, but the underlying OS is still there somewhere at the end of day and without it nothing happens.

End users don't care, and why should they, as long as the experience is intuitive and reliable? Because of this we should either change the definition of the term 'operating system' or we use a new term to encapsulate the paradigm. I prefer to think of vehicles like Chrome as enablers – wrapping up and hiding all the disparate parts that are the internet, much like a TV set, which conceals a myriad of complex technologies and presents a simple and intuitive interface to the world.