Will Google OS Do This?

With all the recent hype about the Google OS news, I got to thinking about what a current OS is and does and what a Google OS might be able to do. There is a whole lot of talk about the competitive landscape this new OS will compete against. There are also discussions about its predicted efficiency and small footprint, and lots of comparisons against Windows.

My angle on this is a bit different than most. I am concerned about the ramifications of a completely new OS built from the ground-up and potentially being web-based. What would this mean to developers? What new types of applications might we see? What new OS features would this implement?

I recall a few years ago about a new directory structure Microsoft was working on (for their Longhorn project) that was based not on today’s flat file structure but rather on a relational database model. This got me thinking about how Google OS might implement the directory structure. I assume a directory structure will still be needed for downloading files and saving them somewhere. The OS of course would need to manage this directory structure, but does Google OS be able to resurrect and implement a relational database model? What does it mean to download and “save”?  Would “saving” be to the “cloud” or to the local client?

Let’s assume Google OS will indeed manage files but will do so in a “cloud”. So anytime a file is saved or retrieved the OS would be doing so from and to the cloud. On the backend, how could Google manage all this information? I think that would mean Google would need to allocate a relational database to this massive effort. In so doing the new Google OS, on any client machine, would in effect manage a directory structure based on relational database technology. The end user could therefore be able to transparently perform all sorts of queries against his data using a new interface, a super cousin of today’s windows explorer.

I haven’t revisited all the discussions that occurred when Microsoft first proposed this approach years ago, and I imagine there could be some incredible things that were mentioned and that can now be more easily implemented by the Google OS. Whenever I get a chance I will review some of these and add some more to the discussion.

[At this time I don’t have time to carry this discussion into the ramifications to developers and applications but I hope to return to this soon.]

I am no expert in OS technology, never having even enrolled in an OS course, so I invite someone out there to continue this discussion. Perhaps there is already a discussion about this somewhere, so please put a link in a comment here.