ChromeOS
It hasn’t gotten much attention in the ubuntu universe yet, but Google announced ChromeOS. The sparse information available tells you that it will be a google chrome browser running on top of a linux kernel running webapps. It will be free. As in speech.
It is targetet towards netbooks and “web oriented use”. All the apps will not be tied to the chrome browser, but will run in any other standard conformant browser.
Now we all know that google has already a decent set of web applications that mean to replace long existing tools (Office, webmail, calendar, instant messaging). The (german) online media sees this as the next big attack on microsoft, targeting windows.
This is where they lose me. For ChromeOS to replace windows (or any other currently used desktop OS), it either has to offer the same set of applications or all the users will use their PCs “web oriented” exclusivley in the future. I don’t see any of this happening.
So what is in it for “us”? Just some additional webapps that we can use or not? A fast OS that we can run on our netbooks? A new approach to computing that will make our current OS obsolete?
Tags: (k)ubuntu
09. Juli 2009 um 17:04
[...] See original here: ChromeOS [...]
09. Juli 2009 um 17:06
It’s spelled “lose”, not “loose”.
09. Juli 2009 um 17:49
@Jeremy: Thank you.
Now waiting for the first comment with content
15. Juli 2009 um 05:23
I agree. It seems like for the past decade or so, the media and clueless management have been grasping for silver bullets to solve some problem with no thought or effort, like alchemy. They don’t even wait until some announced project exists before lauding it as the ultimate solution.
Here’s a tip: People bring netbooks to all sorts of places that don’t have Internet connections, or at least not ones fast enough to throw AJAX back and forth every few seconds. Certainly not ones they should be trusting to transmit all their personal documents over. Microsoft started tooting the SAAS (with a gleam of “nickel and dime them to death”) a long time ago, and you can see how much of their software they’ve moved to web-based services.
Lastly, by definition this will suffer some of the same problems all Linux-based products do: lack of cooperation from hardware vendors, poor usability and documentation, and the “It doesn’t work like what I use at work/school” syndrome. I’m not knocking Linux (I’m an officer in http://www.blu.org), but it’s always had an uphill battle in these areas.