Bye-Bye Windows: Google Chrome OS

[tickler]

Well right after the new Google browser thread.
http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ad.php?t=53062

Google vs. M$ Operating Systems

Google Announces Chrome OS
Google announced that it has upped the ante yet again, and will release a new operating system based on Google Chrome.

The new operating system, aptly named Google Chrome OS, will be an open-source operating system initially geared toward netbooks, Google announced in a press release this evening.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/16802...chrome_os.html

[kickass]

That's really interesting, it would be nice to know if it will be compatible with Wiindows software.

[nate]

YALD

Yet Another Linux Distro. You'd think 50 bazillion would be enough.

[MeatPounder]

I wonder if the chrome browser is going to be fully integrated into the chrome OS, and if so will it be able to be removed from the os...after all they made microsoft do that...

[nate]

Originally Posted by MeatPounder

I wonder if the chrome browser is going to be fully integrated into the chrome OS, and if so will it be able to be removed from the os...after all they made microsoft do that...

Not if they make enough campaign contributions

[~NH~]

Interesting Article On CNN From Wired Magazine

Odds are stacked against Chrome OS's success
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/g...ges/index.html

[alphamonk]

Macs OSX uses the BSD Operating System as its base and the GUI version of the Mac OS works well and is intuitive for its users. If Google can preform some Mac magic and they definitely have the software developers to do it, I can see the Google OS making good headway into the OS marketplace.

[cd34]

CNet article on Google Chrome

Evidently there was someone using it in March to browse a CNet site. Reading deeper into the article and we find that CNet has some incredible data retention for your browsing habits.

I think Chrome will appeal to a particular portion of the market and not to the mainstream. Since they are pushing it as a thin-client architecture, that means the muscle is on the web. If you run Google Gears in your current browser, that is about the effect that it will have. You surf the web, you check email, you check your voicemails, keep up with web sites, type the occasional document with Google Docs, etc. Since it is a thin client, the CPU requirements for it won't be intense allowing your Aunt or Grandmother to use an old machine that would otherwise be unconnected. Or, you could enable a school to use older Pentium III machines and still experience the web. 3d gaming and other processor intensive games aren't what Google OS is targeting. Applications that currently run on the machine would be replaced by cloud applications. Quicken via cloud, etc. It is a bold step and you are changing the way people need to think.

Imagine the OLPC initiative if you only had to use a thin-client architecture. The CPU and RAM requirements would be small as long as the person could connect to the net. Your smartphone would require less cpu horsepower because the cloud is doing the work for you. One of the GPS apps for the IPhone already does this -- when you ask for a path, it is calculated on their server and the turn by turn navigation is sent to your phone as a small 'path payload'.

Google OS isn't for everyone -- it is going to be for the people not currently on the net or those that have older hardware. My mom doesn't play games on the computer -- she uses email, downloads pictures, writes the occasional letter to send to her friends that don't have computers. Students that are writing code in classrooms today could be learning python with the app engine so that they could write tomorrows cloud applications.

Those are google's targets.

I don't believe they are trying to get everyone under the sun to use their OS - they are trying to hand utility to the people that may not have a great experience today with their older hardware or with limited budgets for computers.

Based on linux, yes. Recognizable as Linux from the outside? probably not. The Chrome browser is barely recognizable as being based on Safari's Webkit.

[ArtWilliams]

I've been meaning to give my 2 cents.

With cloud computing your data ends up on the servers of Google, MS or whatever service you use. Do you really want to sign away rights to one of these companies to hold your precious emails, spreadsheets and word processing files? What is their liability if they delete them? Will there be effective backup mechanisms? What about privacy?

Chrome OS viability depends on wide spread, high speed connectivity to the Net because the apps are server based. If you're outside an urban area of the developed world and depend on dial-up or lite cable modem Internet access then Chrome will not be an option. Like Bill Gates who predicted us all using electronic wallets at the turn of the last century, I think that a successful cloudcentric OS is many years away. I say this even though I am a big Open Source supporter and a Ubuntu user who really wants to see a Linux desktop succeed. At best, Google Chrome OS will take away a tiny bit of the netbook market that is currently occupied by Windows XP.

[cd34]

Originally Posted by artwilliams

Chrome OS viability depends on wide spread, high speed connectivity to the Net because the apps are server based.

I think with google gears and ajax/json, you really are allowing a lower-bandwidth connection to be usable. You aren't loading the application across the wire -- just the presentation screen. Using Google OS is going to be more like using Remote Desktop than having a remote hard drive that everything is loaded from.

Try gmail on a 56k connection. Compare that to using Thunderbird with POP for the same functionality, or, Thunderbird with IMAP. Even IMAP is slower than using gmail.

With gears, it gets even quicker because they use json to get the data to you without requiring page refreshes. While wordpress's implementation of Gears isn't the greatest, you can see some definite speed improvements when using it over using their web interface. Less of an advantage with 2.8 than you saw with 2.6/2.7. I believe Google OS is going to make a low bandwidth connection more usable. Sure, someone more net-savvy isn't going to use it, but, I still think they are going to get a lot of netbook users because their solution is going to require less CPU than a comparable windows 7 netbook. Less CPU = longer battery life. Do you want a netbook that you have to plug in every 3 hours or one that can last 8 hours? Moving the cpu horsepower to the cloud and running thin-client makes it easier to get a more usable netbook. What do you find more people doing with netbooks? They are surfing the web. Even salesforce.com's CRM is web based now. Contact management and scheduling is very easy to do on the web. So much of what is done today is web based anyhow, so, wouldn't you prefer a lightweight OS that did browsing extremely well?

And while google does want to make you use their cloud, part of their initiative is to push cloud based computing -- anyone's cloud. They released details for internal engines that allowed people to build products from their research -- and funded startups that used that technology -- startups that sold their solution to competitors.

With Hadoop, DFS/GFS and many of the other projects out there that google has contributed to, it isn't hard for an organization to deploy their own cloud and use their own cloud apps. 3tera is one company that will sell you a cloud solution and if you want, you can use something like eucalyptus to build it yourself.

Try using Google Docs and compare that to running OpenOffice.Org for typing a short memo. Now, while you're editing that document, have a team member add a paragraph. Set up your document to allow collaboration with another author and have them edit the document while you're still writing. Remember that paragraph you deleted 5 days ago? Look back through your revisions to see what was removed.

Whether you want your data to exist on the cloud is a good question and one that you'll have to answer yourself. From a utility standpoint though, if it exists on the cloud, you could walk into any internet cafe, sit at anyone's desktop/laptop computer, or log into a workstation from an office and everything of yours is right there.

It is a paradigm shift from what is commonly accepted, but, I don't see widespread acceptance of it for a while. Android hasn't taken off nearly as well as I had hoped, but, it is being taken quite seriously as a contender. I don't know of any other phone OS that was adopted and brought to market that quickly. Even symbian which was a limited partnership between the big phone companies failed to be accepted by some of the partners on their phones. Even Nokia, which completely owns it, distributes phones that don't use Symbian OS.

Google provides quite a bit of influence.... and I don't think they would be too disappointed if Google OS wasn't as widely accepted as a competing product that pushed the same paradigm.... then they would buy that company.