What trends are occurring in the development of operating systems for personal computers?

Answer 1

More efforts are going into cloud computing (the idea of storing most information on the internet) Microsoft is trying to create a Windows version for all this cloud computing to take place called Azure. And the next version of Windows will probably have more of the Windows Live cloud stuff. Google are trialling an OS based on a Google Chrome web browser, so all work is done using web apps and info in stored in the 'cloud'.

That's another addition that is being more focused on is the idea of app stores. Linux distro's have had these for years, but Apple are starting to take the app store idea from iOS products and onto the Mac. Microsoft will probably try somthing similar.

Multi touch integration was tried to some extent in Windows 7 and will probably be improved a bit in the next Windows. Apple are increasing multi-touch in the next version of Mac OS 'Lion'.

The only other trend would appear to be increasing memory usage in commercial operating systems.