> Would it cost more than a billion dollars to assemble an elite team of a few hundred people to build a new OS? Would Apple, Microsoft, or Google notice the billion dollar cost? Or even two billion?
It's not a matter of money, resources, or talent. For reference: The Mythical Man-Month, waterfall process, Windows Vista.
Building something of this scale and complexity from scratch will take a lot longer than even the most conservative estimate and will take many more years to shake out the bugs. Again, remember Windows Vista? And that was not nearly as revolutionary as the things you suggest.
Consider also that basically every single ground up "we are rethinking everything, and doing it right this time" OS rebuild from scratch has been a failure. There have been dozens, if not hundreds of examples.
I would argue that BeOS was not a failure as an OS, but it was a failure in the market where it couldn't find a clear place for itself, and was attempting to break into a market pretty much totally dominated by MS at the time.
Remember in the time of home computers, there were many good Systems that were pretty much from scratch implementations (Amiga, GEM and Archimedes) so the idea of creating a totally new OS against the incumbents (Windows and OSX) is not totally pointless.
It's not a matter of money, resources, or talent. For reference: The Mythical Man-Month, waterfall process, Windows Vista.
Building something of this scale and complexity from scratch will take a lot longer than even the most conservative estimate and will take many more years to shake out the bugs. Again, remember Windows Vista? And that was not nearly as revolutionary as the things you suggest.