My friend Eugenia over at OSNews.com was lamenting how boring operating systems have become. And I agree. How far we've fallen from the exciting times of 1991 when pre-emptive multitasking, protected applications, flat memory, and object oriented interfaces were about to be delivered to the masses. Since then, improvements to operating systems have been incremental. Or in some cases, we've actually regressed (largely thanks to jerks taking advantage of open systems to create viruses and spyware). IBM's OS/2 was well on its way to providing an OS in which users from around the world could seamlessly integrate new functionality into the operating system via SOM and OpenDoc. Of course, had that occurred, it would have been the mother of all opportunities for spyware vendors and the creeps who make viruses. The 90s could be looked back upon as a time of naiveté and idealism. It was in that environment that ActiveX and VB Script and Internet Explorer Outlook Express were designed that we now rue because of the exploitative nature of malicious people. And so in the past few years the two major OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple have largely taken on the role of tossing in features into the OS that third parties had already provided or that the other had managed to come up with on its own. And then after that the Linux vendors then try to mimic that (there, I've offended all 3 camps!).