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Notes on Chromium OS
It's fairly easy to create technology, but it's really hard to change the way people think. "Real" apps on the web have a chicken/egg problem: no one builds them because they assume everyone can install natively. Why is there no "web Skype"? Because Skype assumes that being cross-platform with QT is enough.What Google is saying is "We envision a future where most of people's daily computer usage can be done entirely online." Not professional image editing, or publishing, or recording an album. But chatting, checking email/wave, taking notes, whipping up a spreadsheet to analyze data, posting to websites for help, reading the news and researching can be done that way.
But WHY? Why would anyone go for Chrome OS instead of a regular old laptop? Because, like me, they're tired of it. They'd be happy to have desktop at home and a laptop at work and a cell phone in their pocket. But how the heck do you get the contact on your cell phone into your work and home computers? Do you install sync software everywhere and sync all the time? You have an idea in the car, but it belongs in the notebook on your desktop at home...how do you manage that, easily, seamlessly? Or, as Google points out, you lose the device. The photo you took with your phone or your webcam is now lost. My GPS doesn't store where I drove and sync with my camera in my phone to associate photos with places, and merging those two and getting them online to send to my family is a huge pain. Because these devices all operate in a mode that is fundamentally local and only incidentally networked. Data syncing is a pain, and it prevents us from buying lots of different devices that are meant for use in all kinds of situations. Sure, the cloud is available on these devices, but it's not the /standard/. Gadgets don't scale, and it's not because of technology, it's because of a barrier in how people think about gadgets.
I didn't get this until I got an Android phone. Suddenly, the whole problem of how I manage email syncing and contact management on my phone wasn't easier...it simply disappeared entirely. I just don't think about it anymore. If I add a contact in my phone, I know it'll be there when I go to dial it from Google Voice at work. It's just not a problem I think about anymore. Well, what if /most/ of my data were like that? We can come close with products like DropBox, which I use and love, but that's not everything...it's about 2GB of my stuff. Chrome OS is about the idea that you can have an extra computer that covers many of your daily usages and tasks, but without any of the overhead of owning a new computer. No antivirus to install (the root partition is read-only), no local or remote backups to make, no data syncing. That is how I see the vision for Chrome OS, and it is not a vision that is going to materialize because source code was released today, or because they sell a netbook with a new OS on it next year. It is a vision that will be realized because people will be tired of having to sync yet another of their dozens of devices (Desktop, laptop, netbook, cell phone, GPS, Camera...) and will realize that life just got quite a bit less complicated when they used a lightweight, cheap netbook with Chrome OS on it.
