In a word, no. We may be reaching the point where the desktop OS is no longer important, eclipsed by the developments of the browser and ironically a victim of better integration by Microsoft and others.

Yet we are all huddling around the news feeds coming out of Build 2011 as we try to figure out what Microsoft is attempting with Windows 8 and Metro. My prediction is that this will become the OS/2 of the modern era: an OS that is so elegant but instantly obsolete by events, designed for the wrong chip (the mobile ARM CPUs) and based on a cellphone design ethos that no one could care less about. Yeah, but it has a great new set of APIs!

It wasn’t all that long ago that Internet Explorer became almost indistinguishable from Windows Explorer. And with the rise of Chromebooks and how much of our time is spent online, the days of the particular desktop OS is almost irrelevant now.

» via ReadWriteWeb