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Gmail Creator Says Chrome OS Is As Good As Dead
An anonymous reader writes "Former Google employee, Gmail creator, and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit has come right out and said what many people are thinking (or hoping for). On his FriendFeed page, Buchheit made a post titled 'Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or "merged" with Android).' In it, he bluntly says that Google's netbook-centric Chrome OS is as good as dead. 'Yeah, I was thinking, "is this too obvious to even state?", but then I see people taking ChromeOS seriously, and Google is even shipping devices for some reason,' Buchheit writes. 'Because ChromeOS has no purpose that isn't better served by Android (perhaps with a few mods to support a non-touch display).'"
Why upload data into the cloud if you don't need to share it or have access to it on the move?
1) so you can look hip and tell your friends you work "in the cloud"
2) because you generously want to share all your data with Google, so they can turn around and sell it for beaucoup bucks to marketers and get rich on your back
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Only Apple and their fans complain about Android's supposed fragmentation.
Based on my experience, Chrome is a solution in search of a problem. I've had it running in a VM on my laptop. Seriously, if you're going to be springing for a low end notebook anyway, there's not much of a cost advantage to buying a ChromeOS machine and one that can run a full-featured OS. This might have made sense a few years ago when prices were higher, but a quick look around tells me I can get a refurbed notebook for around $200 that'll run Windows or Linux adequately to do anything Chrome does, and quite a bit more besides.
As a business tool, it's all but useless. Google provides no mechanism for installing even standard Linux VPN software which most companies provide for their remote employees. Or any other software, for that matter. Also, no company with a brain in their head is going to allow employees to be storing internal data on another company's servers. This might be a little more useful if a company could customize it to use internal servers rather than Google's, but as far as I've been able to tell, that option just doesn't exist.
As a striped down Linux distro, it isn't bad, but the lack of a mechanism for loading 3rd party software negates even that benefit. So you have to ask - who would use this, and why? There isn't even a cost advantage for the software. You can download a standard Linux distro that has all the features of Chrome, and a wealth of standard productivity tools to boot for the same price as Chrome - free.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
3) so you never have to worry about backing up data
I think convergence between Android and ChromeOS is the most insignificant part of this.
The most important thing to note is that people are getting fed up with the so-called "cloud". That approach has been hyped for a few years now, and while many of us realized it's a bad approach from the very start, the rest are finding this out the hard way. After so much failure and hardship, people want nothing to do with it.
It's basically the same situation that happened with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. They were "new" and "trendy" technologies that got a lot of hype. Smart people saw that Ruby was basically Perl with a slightly more readable (but less powerful) syntax, and that Rails was nothing but yet another web development framework. A lot of non-technical people who just wanted to sell books and host conferences built up a massive hype storm. Given that this foundation was not based on merit of any sort, Ruby and Rails were never able to prove themselves as being solutions to real problems. People soon got fed up with them, and went back to proven technologies.
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe. They don't want to dick around with half-assed web "apps" that just make life miserable, and makes data retrieval damn near impossible.
With the ARM notebooks coming, and the fact that it' is rumored to support virtual machines, the cloud, and many other features, ChromeOS is far from dead. As soon as the ARM based notebooks are powerful enough, and the cost is in the $200-300 range, I'll buy one.
Please explain why you would want an ARM net/notebook running ChromeOS over an ARM net/notebook running Android and able to do everything ChromeOS can do and then some.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with ChromeOS is it is trying to solve a problem them doesn't exist.
The problem that exists is your Mac, Windows or Linux box gives you the ability to 'change' to some clean state when you quit your browser.
Google wants to track you from power up to shutdown and Chrome is the first good attempt in that direction.
ChromeOS is like a browser that never gets its cookies cleaned and reverts to a cookie safe hardware state on booting.
A huge leap in tracking your habits.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Meh. REAL men these days just upload a torrent of their encrypted data to the Pirate Bay with the description "WikiLeaks insurance file" and wait for a few other people to start seeding.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Who, exacly, is fed up with the "cloud" besides we, the average slashdotters? People are using "cloud" services more and more, like Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, etc. Companies, Universities and even public organizations are moving to Gmail and other Google services (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/three-million-businesses-have-gone.html).
Where are this people moving from the "cloud" to locally based applications and services?
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Actually for us it's a business concern. We were evaluating whether or not to allow Android device to connect to our corporate intranet and decided against it for that very reason. Not due to development related fragmentation issues, but rather OS fragmentation that makes security updates and vulnerabilities much more difficult to track and to resolve via updates. With vendors still pushing out 1.5, our corporate security was hesitant to endorse an OS with known vulnerabilities and no timely updates from the handset vendors.
With the iPhone, we can force users to upgrade to the latest OS version, and give them a time window to comply. With Android, it's not that easy. Blindly cutting off a specific version of the OS due to some vulnerability could potentially flood our help desk with calls regarding connection failures. Not feasible.
Where are this people moving from the "cloud" to locally based applications and services?
While I agree with your basic premise that average people aren't sitting around raging about cloud services, I do disagree somewhat with the above. Speaking for myself, I very often choose to use the Amazon or eBay apps on my iPad rather than using the web sites. Let's face it, web sites SUCK compared to traditional applications. We tolerate it because we were drunk with the mass variety of web sites, but when you come right down to usability and responsiveness, HTML (yes, even 5) is a crude, crude, CRUDE tool.
Using a local binary app on the iPad is just so much better than using the respective web site. Maybe we'll see better web technology in the future, but it's hard to compete with a locally running application for responsiveness.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
For a totally new definition of "myth" that means the opposite of what most people think it means.
It is one of the concerns for that platform - the fact that 1.6 devices are still shipping, and that the handsets out there all have various levels of hardware that are far more disparate than the small range of hardware on iOS devices makes this so.
It is a strength of the android platform in one sense, and a downside in others, just as iOS has the reverse stengths and weaknesses in this sense.
Add to this the problems with some android handset vendors locking down the ability to update to the newer android versions and you have a fragmentation issue.
People want to use real, locally-running applications that help get work done, where their data can be kept local and safe. They don't want to dick around with half-assed web "apps" that just make life miserable, and makes data retrieval damn near impossible.
I'm writing this in the safe mode of my windows laptop. Why? Because it crashes constantly. It didn't do that a week ago, it hasn't been physically damaged and it doesn't do that in the safe mode so I doubt that it is a hardware issue. Rather, some process has gone nuts and Windows can't handle it. Perhaps updater to some application I have has corrupted or began interacting poorly with my firewall or whatever... God knows. I, on the other hand, have been trying to stop all unnecessary processes from autostarting and constantly booting between safe mode and normal mode in order to find the culprit... But haven't succeeded yet. It is made more difficult by the fact that there is no way of knowing which processes are essential to the system and which are not.
I, for one, would love to use "half-assed web apps" instead of going through the hell that is managing all the applications on your computer. You can say "Haha, it sounds like you suck" or "Haha, Windows sucks". Well, perhaps. Let's assume that I, a third year software engineering student, don't have the basic skills required to maintain the computer. Or that the world's most used OS is a horrible piece of crap. Even if either of those is true, it's also a symptom of the underlying problem: Computers have became so complex that even if it is possible to understand everything that you desktop is doing at any given time, it's a shitload of work and there are very few people who really do understand that all (No, I don't believe that all Linux users do, even if they technically could). That being the case, there are rather obvious benefits for Joe Average (or even tech savvier people) for not having to deal with it. Oh, just think of the web apps: Little more than a group of bookmarks. No registry entries, no hidden processes... What you see is what you get. The things can be clearly divided to two categories: Simple things on your end, and the the cloud, details of which won't bother you. (IE: The original meaning of the cloud)
Sure, there are some problems but I don't know if they're all that serious. At least not for everyone. It's a rare condition that I don't have internet access. It's a lot more common condition that I have other minor computer woes. The problems with the cloud are different than the ones without it, but it's a stretch to call them greater and a massive stretch to say that people specifically want the old/current way. Also, your point about difficult data retrieval baffles me... I would say 9 times out of ten, the data in the datacenters, is better backed up, is less likely to get lost/stolen/etc. If you refer to a situation where you permanently deleted something and a regular hard drive would still let you recover it but you can't do it through the cloud apps... That's a feature that hasn't been implemented in cloud apps but not an inherent problem with the cloud.
I predict that after people get disillusioned with "the cloud", there'll be a strong push towards moving your data back onto devices you physically own.
See, I can make predictions, too.
But you're still relying heavily on cloud based services to host and process the data - the app is just a frontend to a webservice. I don't think it's the language the UI is written or the way you download the code the difference between the "cloud" or locally-running apps.
In fact, moving towards cloud hosted webservices means you can have multiple UI frontends in any language and for any platform with much less porting effort.
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So another article on Slashdot from techies confidently asserting that a new product will be a failure. Considering the record of similar attacks on iPod, iPhone, and iPad, this strikes me as the best evidence that it will succeed. Of course, the open system purists are inevitably up in arms over anything that is not general purpose or completely open to customization, and seem innately unable to comprehend just how small is the market segment for which this is a significant consideration.
So let's look at why it might succeed:
1. Cheap. It should work very well on very low end processors that chug when loaded down with a general purpose OS trying to multitask multiple applications. Power applications will run in the cloud. This could well become the dominant platform for the 3rd world as internet connectivity continues to rise.
2. Secure. I commonly have people coming to me complaining about their computer being "slow," and when I look it over, I find that it has been colonized by viruses and spyware. There is a large group of people who just want to browse the web, and don't feel like they should need to be computer security experts to keep their systems running smoothly. These may also be favored by businesses that don't want to deal with the potential security leaks due to people installing unapproved software on their PCs
3. Uniform. Every ChromeOS platform will be running essentially the same software, based upon the same browser. A company that delivers services through this platform will be relieved of a lot of support headaches arising from differences in user hardware or the presence of "nonstandard" software (see 2)