Google Chrome OS

I suggest watching the video below about Google's impending Chrome OS. I will discuss thereafter.



When I saw this video, and finally completely understood what Google has been, and continues to oh so diligently work on, my draw dropped. After reading a number of viewer comments on Engadget, Gizmodo, and Google's blog I found a resounding opposition. So many people seem to be saying "Everything operated via internet connection...FAIL!"

Yet I see this as entirely the opposite. It is anything but failure, but a huge stride forward in where things are going. Don't get me wrong, I completely understand some people's opposition. The "power users" if you will (of which typically hang out quite a lot of the tech blog websites) - those that eat Photoshop, Final Cut, and Crysis 3 for breakfast - are in opposition to an idea with complete disregard to the target market.

Chrome OS is not (well at least currently) attempting to replace your desktop computer, yet instead trying to replace your netbook. Netbooks, as you may or may not know, are one of the fast growing sectors in the computer industry. As a whole everyone (aside from the mysterious Apple of course) has jumped on the Netbook bandwagon. And what are Netbooks for... well... the Internet of course!

Sure they can do a number of other tasks, yet when it comes down to it, most Netbooks are used for like three things - email, web browsing, and maybe some word processing stuff. This being the case Chrome OS can do all of this - in the browser!

The idea here is what I find so interesting. Ultimately, Google is stretching from the world of hard drives with their ever-present limitations to that of "the cloud." Which sure, it too has a bunch of hard drives, yet as internet streaming capabilities continue to increase, we may see smaller and smaller devices - is it not the hard drive that deems the size of most of our devices? And even if you were to counter with flash memory for example, think about power consumption? If we were to put everyting in the cloud, a streaming internet connection would of course be needed, but that's it! Your computer would no longer be running a continuous 50 background applications.

I find this concept quite exciting, for think of future applications. When internet truly does become all inclusive (which may be a while, yet LTE proves a quite promising not so distant future) one could effectively reduce their everyday browsing devices significantly.

Granted as smartphones continually progress, I imagine the Netbook market, though currently blossoming, will quickly again become obsolete - given impracticality of having a Netbook for web-browsing, a phone for web-browsing, and finally a computer for some hardcore functionality.

I would hope, and as many reports have suggested, this cloud transition will move to most of our wireless everyday devices - as both Apple and MIcrosoft have confirmed their future focus. The idea of moving to the cloud could open up a multitude of computing frontiers, thus I must give praise to Google - for it has taken that first leap needed, to push technology ever-further.

Google Blog