It seems that operating systems development is loosing it's importance. No new OS has appeared for almost two decades (please correct me if I'm wrong) and the existing ones either put on weight or doesn't change much. The changes are in the GUI, in the cloud, in database technology, in the Web browser... but not much in the OS. Windows is just getting more and more complex and difficult to manage by its creator, MacOS is a BSD Unix with a very nice GUI and iOS is a simplified MacOS. And Unix i.e. Linux is just getting more and more complicated and used only by experts or some enthusiastic people (which are experts as well by the way). Unix lost is elegance and simplicity long time ago. It's and remains a large treasure trove for companies who need some kind of operating system on their own. (OK I exaggerate a bi.t) Above that... VMS is not really relevant, IBMs solutions are slowly dissolving, Plan9 impact is rather hidden in Linux. Be disappeared and I haven't heard about QNX recently (hopefully it's only my fault). Symbian is at the end of its life-cycle and Android is also a Linux derivate.
Maybe the fundamental development of operating systems is over. Tasks done by OSs before re going to be accomplished by GUIs, Browsers, web servers, databases and different services. Large cloud vendors will tailor their (most probably Linux based) platforms but end user devices doesn't need anything more than an Unix/Linux/BSD/... kernel. Maybe in a th Internet world a real operating system isn't needed at all. A set of of utilities and some common libraries - automatically downloaded from the cloud - can do. Most of processing is done in the cloud and what we identify as OS is the GUI which does nothing else just translates keys, mouse clicks/movements and gestures to the utilities which we call programs. Peripherals are simplified and seen by the OS as special servers.
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