Look to Mobile OSs for innovation in OS design. Like the author stated, it's currently where the money is. It's the closest we have to "starting over" and alot of things were rethought, such as security and sandboxed apps. IPC is limited to start, but slowly growing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the workstation OSs of the future grew out of our current Mobile OSs
Yeah but writing web apps in HTML/CSS/JavaScript is not the same as using C++.
I would prefer the lower layers also to be written in a memory safe systems programming language, but having the userspace 100% in such a language, would already be quite an improvement versus the current situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if the workstation OSs of the future grew out of our current Mobile OSs