Via Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, Paul Graham has an interesting blog post from last April (link here) arguing that Microsoft has lost the software applications war to Google and other Web 2.0 software start-ups. While this may be something of an overstatement, the heart of Graham's argument is an open source software application known as Ajax. The "x" in Ajax stands for the XMLHttpRequest object, which allows a web browser to communicate with a server in the background, rather than simply by requesting that the server send a new page. Anyone who uses Google's GMail service has seen this bit of software at work, checking for new messages, notifying the user when a new message arrives, and automatically refreshing the inbox message list to display new messages. Other Google applications using this technology include their online word processing and spreadsheet applications.

The Ajax application manages this behind the scenes communication between browser and server, enabling the kind of applications which used to run from the desktop to run in any web browser. To the extent that applications migrate from individual desktops to the web, the role of the computer operating system becomes less and less important. Given Google's lead in this technology, it's hard to see how Microsoft will keep up, particularly since it requires innovating around its main product. And, the biggest irony here is that Microsoft invented the XMLHttpRequest object to let its Outlook email application work seamlessly with external mail servers.

(As an aside of no relevance to this post, there is a very cool graphical explanation of the Mobius transformations of the plane up on the Perfectly Reasonable Deviations blog.)