Computing hardware remains fairly unchanged today. Sure, its bigger and faster, may have a new way of interfacing, or maybe its being used for a different purpose. However at some level it is inherently the same as it has been for 20 years or more in most cases. As a result, some hardware interfaces amount to hacks designed to get old architectures to work with new capacities or speeds. After all, if its not broke, don’t fix it — just lie to it. In a way you could say we’ve begun using a level of virtualization for some applications.

Therein lies the direction modern computing seems to be taking. Not only is virtualization taking place (sort of) at a hardware level, the hardware itself is becoming ridiculously cheap. This opens things up to all sorts of hacks, the biggest of which is virtualization at an OS level. My machine right now isn’t very powerful by modern standards, however it would be easy and pretty worthwhile to setup VMWare and run a second OS at all times. I use two OSes back and forth a lot anyway and I’ve used virtualization in the past. Take this to an enterprise level and what do you get? Entire servers dedicated to virtualization running 10 or however many different operating systems for many different purposes, and end users none the wiser for the most part. Amazon’s S3 services, for example, allow you to setup your own chosen operating system. You get web services with complete root access all hosted by Amazon and, in theory, you could have as many virtual machines as you want.

OSX users may already be familiar with some aspects of this. Windows has a lot of constituents so you can’t operate in any sort of people interactive environment without having some Windows functionality. Bootcamp was the beginning but now with Parallels you don’t even need to restart your machine. Also, with the latest versions, you can even run Direct3d applications like video games; probably the biggest reason I’ve heard for not switching.

In any case, virtualization is becoming more and more commonplace and more and more integrated. Linux and OSX are working with Windows and while Windows is still the arrogant, business-oriented fraternity boy; virtualization is reaching it through such third-party apps as VMWare.

In the end, our ultimate OS may not be made by any one company, it may just be the perfect homogenization of all OSes.