Facebook is working on its own OS, and original Windows NT team member Mark Lucovsky is leading the charge.

“We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us,” Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth told Techcrunch, explaining the firm’s move into operating systems. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”

According to Wikipedia, Lucovsky is now Facebook’s General Manager of Operating Systems. After leaving Microsoft in the wake of the failure of .NET My Services (previously “Hailstorm”), he worked at Google and then VMWare before joining Facebook. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer had infamously thrown a chair across his office when he heard Lucovsky was leaving Microsoft for Google and promised to “[email protected]#$ing kill” Google for this transgression.

Building a new OS in 2019—whatever that means—seems beyond pointless. But Facebook has apparently wanted to do this for some time, and it’s probable that co-founder Mark Zuckerberg feels that he’ll never measure up to industry luminaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs unless he does so. Facebook, of course, infamously tried to field its own smartphone in 2013 and failed miserably.

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