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Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

"The concept of an operating system is pretty straightforward: it is a piece of software that manages a computer, making said computer’s hardware resources"

So the author luxuriously simplified a sophisticated piece of software like an OS to simply prove his point that Alexa can be classified as an OS because it is a software that also manages hardware resources.

Someone please correct but I was under the impression that Alexa is merely a facade OS and behind the scenes it is an amalgamation of sophisticated intertwining of web services and data crunching. Can Alexa still be at its 100% without internet?

Edit 1: Grammar

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Does an OS necessarily need to function without being connected to the Internet? Is there anything wrong with a definition of OS that includes "Internet connectivity"? How does Internet connectivity differ from hard disk connectivity, RAM connectivity, floppy disk connectivity, etc? That brings up questions of what the word "function" means. My phone will technically function without any wireless connection, but then it's not really a phone, is it? The Echo will turn on without an Internet connection, at least far enough to be able to say "I'm sorry, I don't have an Internet connection" most likely.

It's the ages old question: is Linux an OS? No, it's a kernel. Is Ubuntu an OS? No, it's a distribution. Is Gnome an OS? No, it's a desktop environment.

You could say with a straight face that Alexa is an OS that's designed to run cloud software. The OS works without a connection, but the user land might not.

Alexa runs on top of Amazon Echo, which runs on top of Amazon FireOS, which runs on top of Android, which runs on top of Linux, which runs directly on the hardware. Linux itself is a rewrite of Unix, which is a very pared-down variant of MULTICS, a system developed in the 1960s.

Something which doesn't run directly on the hardware, but instead communicates with it through several layers of intervening software, isn't an operating system by any stretch of the imagination, however impressive it might otherwise be.

I'm disappointed that large high-tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook don't develop their own operating systems from scratch like Microsoft did, but instead just take advantage of the hard (but not particularly innovative) work put in by Linus Torvalds and other open source developers. Building something better, using lessons learned in the intervening decades, should be well within their grasp.

It is hard to bootstrap a new O/S ecosystem.

Check out Google's Fuschia for an alternative

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/docs/mg_an...

Yes, that's different (and, with capability-based security, a step in the right direction). Thanks for pointing it out.

I'm not sure how Tansley's concept of ecosystems applies to software (it's just a buzzword to me), but if you mean how to get software running on existing systems to run on a new system, that would take time and effort. If the operating system is intended to run on specific devices (like Magenta/Fuchsia), it might need its own "ecosystem" anyway.

Windows is an amalgamation of drivers, system services and applications.

The only real difference is that Windows runs locally, Alexa doesn't.

As long as it's connected to the internet arguably you can't tell the difference.

Unless you are going to have an academic study about what an "Operating System" is Alexa is an OS since it's the "platform" your applications run on, and it's a unified interface with the same rules and expected behaviour.

Alexa is about as an OS as "Chrome" is (not talking about the linux part of Chrome OS), user's don't know about kernels, drivers, services, daemons and all that nonsense they can grasp what an interface and a platform is and for them it's indistinguishable from an operating system regardless if academically based on current software engineering convention it is one or not.

Technically ChromeOS isn't an operating system either, it's some offshoot of Linux that runs a Chrome Browser and all your apps run as Chrome Apps, you can run native applications to some extent on it as well but it's not the interface and expected behaviour users would experience.

I agree with you on the author's definition being weird, but I do agree with the author's conclusion that Alexa is indeed an "operating system".

I tend to define "operating system" as any software or collection of software implementing both of the following:

* Abstracted access to hardware (whether physical or virtual)

* Execution of other software / applications

In the case of Alexa:

* Alexa implements abstracted access to audio inputs and outputs by performing conversions between audio and text

* Alexa facilitates the execution of "skills", which - while very simplistic - probably technically count as software

I'd sooner call Alexa an "interface" rather than an OS, but calling it an OS is not incorrect.

I agree with you. Alexa is an interface that ties APIs together. Defining OS as software that connects hardware to interfaces seems so reductive that it seems any software could be regarded as an operating system. Is there any software that doesn't access any hardware resources?

I think it's pretty clear that the author is talking about the business, not technical side of things.

Marketing seeks to destroy the meaning of useful technical jargon.

The term Operating System is a good example. Most people have no idea what an OS actually is. They think it is all of the stuff bundled with the OS.

Similarly in the 1980's the term Relational Database was used in marketing materials to describe any micro computer database product that was for sale.

Alexa is 0% without internet. Even timers/alarms won't go off.

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