Bye-Bye Windows: Google Chrome OS

[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.