Hint: It won't be revolutionary.
Since the general press announcement regarding Chrome, Google's new cloud based OS, hit the presses, I've seen all kinds of articles from the media and bloggers discussing how huge of an impact Chrome will have on the computing landscape.
Yeah yeah... we've heard it all before.
Don't get me wrong, moving disk storage and applications and nearly all computing resources to the cloud is a desirable thing. But, this isn't exactly new stuff. Businesses are already doing this with things like Amazon EC2/S3 for storage and machinery, using distributed processing with MapReduce based architectures, and both offering and consuming Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.
They certainly aren't the first OS vendor who's made this vision their modus operandi for what their consumers should experience either. Sun Microsystems for the longest time has been spouting off "The Network is the Computer" as their mantra. Even Apple has been offering MobileMe (formerly .mac) for cloud based storage and synching between desktops.
Here's what Chrome OS will really do - it'll really just drive the existing OS stalwarts to adopt using the cloud faster... much like the Chrome browser did. When Chrome was released, it upped the ante for how performant a browser a should be in regards to speed and responsiveness. Not too long after the release of Chrome, the public is given Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, and IE 8... which are competitive in speed with Chrome and are arguably much more functional (especially in the case of Firefox). So while Chrome introduced new competition, it didn't exactly establish, let alone maintain, a competitive and differentiating advantage over the existing products.
And so it will be with ChromeOS. It will not be the savior of "desktop" computing. It won't come even remotely close to bringing Microsoft down (something not even Google's search has been able to do to MSN/Bing). It will just push the existing OS's to move more intrinsic capabilities to the cloud, which is something Apple has already been doing and something Microsoft definitely has the capacity to support, while achieving and stagnating at a very small and limited share of the overall OS market.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
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1 comments:
One of the major things that Chrome brought to the table (the browser), is the idea of separate processes for each tab, so one doesn't take down the rest. That to me was the most interesting part about what they have done.
I agree as well, that Chrome OS will probably not be revolutionary, but probably spark some revolutions and a sea of changes as people follow with their own implementations.
One thing that troubles me, and I've read this before, is why Chrome OS AND Android. Seems silly to support both when you could pull an Apple and just make one a smaller touch-screen version of the other.
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