Google said Wednesday it is planning to release its Chrome operating system, seen as a rival to Microsoft’s Windows system, for free in the autumn. “We are working on bringing the device later this fall,” said Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai at CompuTex Taipei, Asia’s biggest IT trade show. “It’s something which we are very excited by … We expect it to reach millions of users on day one,” he said.
Really? By who?
The only place it seems to be rivaling Windows at the moment are on Tablets and netbooks
By Google. In their own offices, where undoubtedly it will become the expected, if not mandated, OS. As it should, you’d be hard pressed to find many Windows or Linux boxes at Apple, or indeed Macs or Linux boxes at Microsoft other than for R&D type purposes.
Will be interesting to see if Google can get much of a foothold in the real world, where corporate solutions and backward support for ancient vertical products is compulsory.
My prediction: not a chance. Not when you need to be connected to the internet to do such a simple thing as printing, and not when it is completely reliant on remote sync to Google. I don’t think many corporation CEOs will want their sensitive information posted somewhere beyond their control. Heck, I don’t even want it on my netbook. I value control over my own local data too much, not to mention that I need more than web apps.
Yes, but only people who do office suite chores. As is, it won’t be much good to most people outside those tasks.
I really don’t see it as a rival to anything. Unless somehow they have it set up so you can create your own ‘cloud’. By this I mean if you have a tablet running Chrome OS, and a server online or at your home/work where you can synchronize data to.
As others have said, what CEO would want his important information on a server that is outside of his/her company’s control?
Then again I’ve always said from the beginning that cloud computing was a dumb idea.
Small offices rarely have someone (or a CEO) to take care of a server so being able to let someone else handle it is a necessity to them. Hiring an outside company to maintain it could be expensive so some will go the Google route and leave everything to them to store.
I’d like to switch to Google Chrome OS as soon as it’s available but it doesn’t support any native code apps. Well I don’t use much/any native code apps… except for my dev stuff apps. The only obstacle prevents me from switching to Chrome OS is missing:
* JDK/JRE support > can’t use my favorite IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) or write&compile anything in any JVM language
* missing Python support or support for any SDK/language beside Ajax and shell script(?)
As Chrome OS is OSS I hope there will be any unofficial solutions for theses issues. Also great parts of the Google staff (devs!) can’t use the OS until these issues are solved.
I think Google, like Apple, believe that everything should be rewritten for these new platforms because they represent a new paradigm that the old model does not fit.
There’s PHPAnywhere and Bespin, that allow you to edit code online. This kind of model has no ‘local’ to speak of. You edit and save the files online in their intended location, which saves a lot fo save->FTP roundtrips.
ChromeOS cannot and will not try to provide everything for every kind of user–that’s a lost battle and defeats the 80/20 rule. Google want an OS where users use 100% of the rather limited functionality and hope to just ride out the interim period where development is tied to desktop OSes until solutions are invented for coding online.
Can [we] stop trying to make OSes that work for the average Joe as well as the elite developer? They’ve failed. There’s nothing wrong with an OS for Joe, and an OS for Linus.
The problem is that many people love to use a Joe operating system for everyday work and a Linus operating system when they need it for some advanced work. A computer is a computer, why should we buy one computer for content consumption and one for work ?
Maybe a solution would be to make an OS which offers several modes of operation. You work in “Joe mode” everyday, and turn the computer in “Linus mode” when there’s some hacking job to do. Modern Linux desktop arguably does this with the optional shell interface (though there’s still room for improvement in the Joe area…)
Edited 2010-06-03 10:05 UTC
Agreed on all counts. KDE came close to offer something like that with its latest iterations. The Plasma Netbook interface, although somewhat crude and intended to be used on devices with really small screens, is something that I can see Joe Six-Pack using on a daily basis without too much trouble even on larger devices and if/when Joe need to use something beefier, he can simply go to System Settings and switch back to the regular Plasma interface.
I’ve been experimenting with that UI with my wife and children on my laptop and got mostly positive feedback. The misses did not like much the fact that her old interface was “gone” but did mention once or twice that the cleaner UI of the netbook interface plus the nifty animations everywhere made it a pleasure to use. The fact that it also uses Nepomuk/Strigi to locate data was also rated as a plus (although I realize that someone running it on a netbook would most likely turn these things off in order to save batteries or to not wear the SSD off too much, if that is the case).
The children loved the big icons, animation and clean separation of applications/tasks by category. Unlike with the misses, I might even leave it as the default interface for them.
I can even see that working on a touch-friendly environment with some tweaks here and there. It seems to me that the effort that the KDE developers made to make Plasma flexible enough for all kinds of devices and use cases really paid off.
I am looking forward to see further development and refinement of that concept.
Edited 2010-06-03 13:19 UTC
Do people still do that in 2010? That’s what the FTP KIO slave was created for!
Besides, one can always SSH into the server, start vim and get it done faster than the OS can load the FTP client.
I know, I know… KDE, vim? What the hell am I thinking? I realize that not everybody is into those things but all that FTP going back and forth ad nauseum sounds so nineties nowadays… ^_^
Ha, That’s what I was thinking, though minus the FTP KIO. I just use Gnome’s little ‘Connect to server’ and use the SSH connection, which of course then mounts through sshfs what I want and then can just drag and drop… Of course that’s if I’m picking and selecting multiple files that are already created.
I usually just use the ‘old-fashioned’ ssh and nano (well I prefer it still over vim, haven’t had the memory (in my brain, not computer) to remember the commands).
Which.. yeah, that’s been around for as long as… well I’m pretty sure it’s been around since the earliest days of the BSDs.
You must be thinking of pico of which nano is an almost perfect clone that was started not too long ago due to disagreements with the non-FOSS license of both pico and pine (which still happens to be much more usable as a MUA than mutt IMHO, but I digress).
But yeah… pico/pine have been around since forever…
http://www.ubuntu.com/server/features/cloud
You don’t have to use ChromeOS just for the internet, many corporations have their own internal web sites.