Atmospheric Workspace OS

@scottlanoue.com has shown it's possible.

Being an Atmospheric OS means the operating system revolves around a high-agency identity structure at its core.

The job of the OS is to give the identity-actor (the human user) agency in a massively networked environment without compromising on the essentials of safety.

The most important aspect of the AT protocol is a sufficiently decentralized form of web-wide identity, coupled with a personal store of data that's primarily user-owned and not platform-locked.

Once you've asserted yourself in digital form on the social internet you can begin to express that identity through various mediums of digital signaling, i.e. social apps. With atproto all those disparate apps can be tied together around a single ID, just like a Google or Apple ID, except this one is actually yours not theirs.

Three years ago I started putting words to something that's been brewing in my internet-soaked mind since the early 2010s:

The general strategy of protocol-based platform building remains unchanged, but the infrastructural landscape has since become greatly simplified by the AT protocol and its atmosphere network, as demonstrated by Scott's incredible prototypes.

I don't just want, I need the Atmosphere OS to be for real as soon as possible. Hopefully we can grow a fine community of volunteering contributors for the open source Atmosphere OS stack that is emerging, but I'm also a big believer in people-scale business-making as an engine of progress.

So is Scott, as shown in the brilliantly cooperative ambitions of Comail.

A common web identity has major implications for personal computing, but the current landscape of "[personal] consumer apps" is awash with subsidized freemium products.

Competing with free is very hard for indies; it means having enough excess capital around to survive years of unprofitability before triggering the hockey stick growth curve.

Selling to businesses (B2B) is famously easier than selling direct to consumers (B2C) because you're dealing in much larger quantities like $100/$10,000 a month, so you're never many sales away from baseline profitability.

So what does 'atmosphere for the workplace' look like? If we're talking about something OS shaped, I think it looks a lot like an atmospheric Rambox.

Rambox (which began as oss) comes from a long line of 'omni-clients', a niche but well established category of Electron/Chromium-based multi-app launchers, including the open source Franz (now closed) and its long line of forks.

The omniclient-for-professionals category is keeping at least some dozens of people employed:

With the atmosphere solving for universal identity and interoperable data streams it's not hard to conceive of a sufficiently differentiated product that could compete in this 'assemble your own workspace' market.

A market opportunity big enough for a small company of 6-12 people does not work for venture-capital but it is a very comfortably coop-shaped venture.

We've got all of this in the atmospherically enabled Beaver browser, currently at the prototype stage.

It's a spiritual successor to @pfrazee.com's Beaker browser.

If there's any project in the atmosphere I wanna see 10x more contributors get involved with it's this one. It won't be production-grade for a while still, but it represents exactly the kind of high-agency browsing experience we should demand of the high-tech future.

However there are two very different, equally critical Jobs to be Done for the Atmosphere OS vision to advance. On the one hand we have the deep R&D work of remaking our browsers, email networks, payment pipes and so on.

But the road ahead to a genuine Chrome(OS) alternative is long beyond belief. Google was in a similar position when Internet Explorer owned 95% of the browser market. Thankfully they had a trojan horse to growth hack (blergh) adoption of their unproven tech.

Starting in 2000, Google’s Toolbar plugged into Internet Explorer and added features IE lacked.

The Toolbar was effectively an emulator of the eventual Google Chrome browser that succeeded it and went on to become the world's most popular browser.

From browser-extension to browser. That's the path an atmospheric apps-launcher in the same vein as Rambox can take as well, going from apps-browser to web-browser and finally a webOS.

In an atmospheric browser, the product on offer is the identity-in-a-box, I.e. the management and facilitation of your everything-account on the internet.

The omniclient helps anchor identity management in a ‘home base’ that actually lives on your computer in the form of very tangible affordances like a local backup of your social data.

discuss!