HP fired a shot heard round the PC world today with its announcement that webOS is coming to the desktop. Are the salad days over for Windows now that two PC manufacturers have decided to ship Linux-based operating systems on their hardware?
I think the answer is yes. Today we saw a big manufacturer make the first move towards against outside operating system interference. The move also points to a future where EcmaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 rule the end-user application space. The true challenge will come from the reluctance of entrenched corporate IT infastructures built on Microsoft's solutions from end-to-end.
HP is not likely to force the issue on the corporate world—the computers will still be able to run Windows. However it is software that drives the adoptance of operating systems, and software developers' language/toolkit of choice that drives what software gets developed. For the first time ever, Microsoft's CLR army may be pitted against another army of developers that outnumber it, each soldier armed with better weapons in the arsenal of webkit + ecmascript than CLR + WPF/Azure/xaml can provide. Perhaps it is time to begin developing some messaging frameworks to the linux kernel from javascript and to learn webOS... Let the great battle between interpreted and compiled begin!
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