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"Last August, author and speaker Clay Shirky posted a message to the Yahoo decentralization group in which he discussed the 'emergent Internet Operating System.' While he didn't coin the term—it's generally attributed to publisher Tim O'Reilly—he did finally provide a clean explanation for it. 'Given the degree to which applications running over the network are taking over some of the work previously done by apps running on individual machines, the idea of an Internet operating system seems a fruitful way to contemplate these effects,' writes Shirky, referring to the symbiotic effects of complex networks. . . . Shirky later pointed out that a more appropriate term was 'Internet Platform,' as suggested by UserLand founder Dave Winer. This label more closely fits the shift from viewing the Internet as a communications network to seeing it as an application development platform."
" . . . the shift from Web pages to executables. Rather than accessing documents at different locations on the Internet, we're now beginning to access applications. And we're building those applications as services that can be accessed by still other applications. This leads us to yet another name, one you've probably heard quite a bit about by now: Web services."
"By building applications that support standard protocols like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, developers are exposing functions and data to other applications. This saves time and money by making it easy to connect existing applications or build new ones. Web services won't save the world . . . but they will open many doors for technology architects. Behind one of those doors is what Tim Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web. In the Semantic Web, applications understand the context and value of messages they receive, and can therefore act as agents on behalf of end-users."
"So then what do you call this phase of the Internet's evolution? Is it the Internet Operating System, the X Internet, the Semantic Web? Or does it not even deserve a name because it's just repeated history? It doesn't matter. The truth is, with any other name, you'd realize the same thing: that the Internet has the potential to be much more than a communications pathway, and that we—the developers, CTOs, designers, and architects—have the power to make it what we wish. Dream big."
1:39:29 PM Google It! 
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