“It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don’t
see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in
turning a full fledged desktop machine into a “Mobile Internet
Device”. Their use cases do not overlap. While a desktop is
certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended
operating area of a desktop machine.“People seem to have lost the perspective on desktop computing.
The desktop has always been an environment with a secondary role to
what people want with it. The desktop needs to be simple, intuitive
and out of the way. Most desktops today just do that. They make
working with programs easier. Desktop computing has always been
about launching powerful programs that make a desktop computer
useful and managing the large amount of data that accompanies it.
That the browser has become a bundled item with the OS is one of
convenience. To do computing you need an OS to launch programs, to
“go online” you need a browser. Both have become plumbing. As such,
both are infrastructure and both are sub-ordinate to the tasks that
people want to perform on top of them.”