People have been talking about “the internet operating system”
for years. The phrase may have been muttered in Netscape days in
the nineties, when the browser was going to be the operating
system; then in the 2000s it was the Google OS that people
discussed. Most notably though, Tim O’Reilly reflected on the
subject, for example here in 2010 (though as he notes, he had
been using the phrase way earlier than that): Ask yourself for a
moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search?
What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the
operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is
the operating system of a tweet? On a standalone computer,
operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux manage the
machine’s resources, making it possible for applications to
focus on the job they do for the user. But many of the
activities that are most important to us today take place in a
mysterious space between individual machines. It is still worth
reading, as he teases out what