IDG Contributor Network: The operating system is dead. Long live the operating system?
Why is it that we in the tech industry are so fond of “out with the old, in with the new”? SaaS will replace on-premises applications! Smartphones will replace laptops! The cloud will replace … everything!
You may have been hearing lately that the operating system is being replaced by containers, serverless computing, unikernels, … the list of things that will purportedly make the general-purpose OS obsolete goes on and on. And, yet, operating systems are alive and well. Jim Whitehurst, in a recent analyst call, said Red Hat Enterprise Linux is “growing faster than expected—17 percent in the fourth quarter versus a low-teens target.”