It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

Steve Jobs has said that Xwindows is brain-damamged and will disappear in two years. He got it half-right.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

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