As you already know if you read this entry into the Office 2.0 bug tracker, I am not a big fan of Office 2.0 desktops. At the end of the day, I am a strong believer of best-of-breed approaches for building a good Office 2.0 setup. Different needs can be best served by different applications, and it will take some more time for integrated suites to emerge, much like it did for Office 1.0. Granted, an Office 2.0 Operating System would be nice, but recent attempts at developing such a thing are missing the marks in my humble opinion.

As far as I can tell, eyeOS and YouOS are not much different from existing and quickly multiplying Office 2.0 desktops, be they called eskobo, Favoor, Google, HomePortals, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, Windows Live, or Zoozio. To me, an operating system is not a collection of point applications, but rather a set of services that all applications need to run. On a personal computer, my operating system provides services such as authentication, file system, and user inputs and outputs. In the Office 2.0 world, such services are called single sign-on, remote storage, and feed aggregation.

An Office 2.0 Operating System should not be a flashy desktop replacement running in a web browser — tabs are doing that just fine, thank you very much. Instead, a good Office 2.0 Operating System should be as transparent as possible, almost invisible. It should provide most of the shared services that are suggested in the Office 2.0 bug tracker, and do that for the most popular Web 2.0 applications, including those developed by Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo!