In the dim past, if you wanted to place a long-distance phone call, you booked ahead of time and the connection was made by an operator, but if you wanted to make a local call, you dialed direct. These different ways to reach your party sound crazy today. Yet that's exactly what we do with computers: We use an operating system like Microsoft Windows to work with local information in our own machines while relying on a different system-a browser like Netscape Communicator-to deal with long-distance information in other machines around the world. There's no reason for this craziness, other than the historic emergence of browsers 40 years after operating systems. It's time for a change!

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