According to industry experts, the "operating system" as we know it is going to seem much less important in the near future. Windows, for example, will not go away but it will no longer be considered the central experience of computing. The recent release of Apple's Tiger OS and the anticipation of Microsoft's Longhorn remind us that, for all intents and purposes, the OS is the computer. But that might all change in the coming years.
Enter Virtualization
Analysts say Intel did a little thing that helped to bump the OS universe off kilter, although the effects will be delayed. The chipmaker funded an open-source project started at Cambridge University in the UK, which now is a Silicon Valley startup called XenSource. It makes a virtualization product called Xen hypervisor, which has only about 25,000 lines of code.
News source: Sci-Tech Today
