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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).'"
They have said that Chromeos and Android would probably converge for a year or so at least.
Seeing that you have "failed it" just proves the author's point. Farewell, ChromeOS!
Whatever the heck ChromeOS is (never heard of it), I can tell you one thing for sure: this guy Paul Buchheit might be right, but he sounds more like he has an axe to grind with the ChromeOS team than anything else.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The problem with ChromeOS is it is trying to solve a problem them doesn't exist. Why upload data into the cloud if you don't need to share it or have access to it on the move?
You don't want to need to upload all your data to the cloud before you can do anything with it.
Cloud computing makes sense for people who want to rent computer processing power on an adhoc basis to solve computational problems.
Computing needs to gradually move to new technologies, it rarely makes huge leaps. ChromeOS would be better being a full Linux desktop for now with cloud services instead of being fully cloud based.
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!
No ssh in and make my project using gcc? What is up? Or am I clueless...
Yeah no kidding, I can't even use Visual C++ on this OS. What a turd...
Worse, I wanted to print something and apparently there's no driver for my standard, HB (#2) pencil.
Won't happen. The attraction to handset makers is they get a reasonably solid base OS they can mess with how they like to create the firmware that'll run on their phones.
The disadvantage to consumers is that handset makers take a reasonably solid base OS them mess with it to create the firmware that runs on their phones.....
Virtual Machines? I think you're thinking of "Chromoting" which I believe is a remote desktop-type feature.
I tried an HTML5 VNC client and it was as slow as molasses, though that's not a surprise because even on desktops I have found VNC to be slow. Hopefully Chrome Remoting will offer better performance.
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.'"
I have an Android phone, an HTC desire. I like the Android part. I do not like the HTC part. They did the same as PC OEMs like to do: Filled it with sponsored crapware. Only worse: This sponsored crapware cannot be deleted, for it is in the read-only* system partition - and as all of it has network access permissions, I suspect much of it is there to gather information on my music, browsing habbits and such for market research. Unsurprisingly, the sponsored crapware includes facebook and twitter, alongside HTCs own apps.
* Really, really read-only. I've rooted the OS, but the phone has some sort of additional protection in hardware that monitors the system partition. If the OS does somehow manage to alter it, the phone immediatly resets itsself, and the bootloader copies the OS back over from a secure backup. HTC evidently is very determined to maintain control over their phones.
He's right. But Google haven't spent 2 years and millions of dollars in a dead project just for fun.
Chrome was announced 2 years ago, when the tablet market was just a speculation, even the iPad was just a rumor at that time. But now, after millions iPads sold and the rise of competitor's tablets struggling for this new market, the netbooks -- the real Chrome OS target -- became irrelevant, or predicted to be dead in a 2-3 years from now.
The advent of the tablets killed the netbooks. So there will be no place for Chrome OS in a near future.
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?
Dilbert RSS feed
ChromeOS if far from dead, but probably a bit ahead of its time. Soon everything will be in the cloud. Already services like Spotify and Netflix are taking over from DVD's and MP3's and as soon as web applications get a bit better we will be using those in the cloud as well. Just imagine no more updates you log on and you will always be using the latest version. The chromeOS will be very light and less prone to bugs and the days of having to spend time to fix your system will be over giving you more time to actually use a computer for what you bought if for. Also the fact that you can access all of your data, music, videos and anything else is great. I say that all this is a bit ahead of its time as there are still many places in the world that do not have the bandwidth to cope with everything being on the cloud but someday they will. Long live the cloud.
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.
from wikipedia "Paul Buchheit is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the creator and lead developer of Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested the company's now-famous motto "Don't be evil" in a 2000 meeting on company values.[1]"
Hmm, why the hate.. It sounds like he's done some stuff.. What have you done?
> With vendors still pushing out 1.5
You mean "selling phones with"? Why not find a vendor "selling phones with" 1.6? Anyway, hardly anyone has 1.6 anymore. What is it now? Less than 17% have 1.6/1.7 combined. As a company, surely you'd choose a phone and stick with it, just like you can specify/mandate OS, browser etc. You're talking about checking email, right?
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.
You actually thought only that iphone have version numbers
Every iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 2, and iPod touch 3 can upgrade to iOS 4. The same can't be said of most Android phones and Android media players.
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.
Meh, most people said similar things about smart phones until Apple came out with a consumer/user friendly iphone. Will Chrome-OS be the iPhone of "cloud computing" systems? IMO probably not, but I wouldn't call the idea dead just yet. I personally don't own a document processor anymore and use Google Apps exclusively. As long as they got the "offline" mode working fine with local synching I think it could be a real winner. Do I want my entire OS to be that way? Not really, but that would fit for all the purposes of my current netbook. I browse the web, IM, and occasionally do some light documents through Google Apps.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
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.
but rather OS fragmentation that makes security updates and vulnerabilities much more difficult to track and to resolve via updates
How is this different than a Win/Mac laptop which could have god-knows-what installed it on it at any time?
ChromeOS isn't targeted to the average /.er - it's targeted to the average computer user. You know, the ones that call you to come fix their computer because they click yes to every question that pops up while surfing the interwebs? Most people really only need the internet and have no use for native apps - or at least really shouldn't be installing native apps. Honestly, I would recommend a product like ChromeOS to at least 3/4 of the non-techy people I know as I don't think a full-blown OS suits their use case well.
Secondly, saying ChromeOS and Android fit the same market is really, really dumb and misses the point completely. One is intended for the touchscreen only, while the other is geared for the traditional mouse and keyboard. These are significantly different UI approaches, targeting significantly different markets, and require more than just simple patching and hacking to go from one to the other. Even patching the OS's UI elements leaves all of the 3rd party applications with a disarray of usability between types of UI. Just look at Windows on the tablet as an example.
It's strange that no one seems to complain about Apple using iOS on its mobile devices, while using OS X on its computers, or that Microsoft uses Windows 7 on the computer and Windows Phone 7 on mobile devices. Instead, this is clearly the preferred approach. Yeah, Google is going the opposite direction, but I think it still applies - you are going between two radically different use cases and trying to go with a one-size-fits-all approach usually yields a one-size-sucks-for-all result. Granted, I'm sure we'll see a gradual merging of the code bases between ChromeOS and Android, but for either to remain a usable product, they need to be tailored for their specific uses.
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.
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./.../
With the iPhone, we can force users to upgrade to the latest OS version, and give them a time window to comply. /.../
Yes, we (as an internal IT company) used to think along those lines.. but to us, the iOS family itself is fast becoming the last straw to the perimeter security model, where we controlled what devices are permitted inside, and trusted them completely. This isn't going to fly much longer. First of all, without infeasible expansion in IT staffing, we are unable to match the quick evolution in the mobile segment: count on no more than 18 months' lifecycles for mobile devices, before being replaced by something which would have to be re-integrated with our standards and network security. Second, the devices aren't company provided any more: the ugly 'consumerization' word is rearing its equally ugly head. People (for now, top management and early adopters) want to bring their own devices, be they smartphones or laptops, to work. We've been fighting a holding action against that trend, mostly on the grounds of security, and to some extent supportability, but few of us think that battle can be ultimately won.
Instead of restricting end users' devices to perpetually out-dated models, our integration, provisioning and security model is tenatively moving towards focusing on their interfaces (communications protocols, information standards), and reducing trust towards devices. For the near future, we'll have to restrict access to confidential information to company-approved devices, and setup network malware and DoS protection as part of the open segments of our internal company networks. In the mid-to-longer term (2+ years), we hope to see increased maturity in virtualization, allowing us to push out a trusted virtual desktop/smartphone image, to which users can switch when sensitive information has to be processed. You can understand our happiness over this announcement, happening a bit faster than we were expecting (even if they aren't at the product stage yet).
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.
Dilbert RSS feed
its just a matter of reliability and speed. there is going to be a time when internet will be completely ubiquitous, high speed all over, and have an insignificant downtime percentage. as we move toward that ideal state, web apps will continue to inch toward 'good enough' for most people. the fact is that people won't need this powerful machines, they just need fast, always-there network access. what is it that you think can't be done over the internet? and please don't list research and other fringe cases.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
You are failing to miss the point.
Freudian slip much? ;-)
You still NEED TO CHECK if the device is running the correct VERSION
I agree. On both iOS and Android, an app needs to make sure that needed services are present and working. The difference comes in what message to display after the app has checked. On an iDevice, you check the iOS version, and if it is not new enough, say "Connect this device to iTunes to upgrade the system software." On an Android device, on the other hand, you check the version and then show "Wait until your contract runs out and buy a new Android device."
apple fanboy
I don't want iOS to win. I want Android to beat iOS yet am disappointed in the Android ecosystem.
My point is not that it matters in general, it's that it's not relevant to assess if $application is cloud based or not.
A native application that relies on the "cloud" to store and process data is still a cloud application, regardless of its language.
Dilbert RSS feed
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)
Why do you think Android devices can't be upgraded or patched?
Because Google hasn't managed to coax Android phone makers, even those in OHA, to make Android upgrades available. Carriers and device makers have been less than forthcoming in pushing out operating system upgrades for existing devices, instead preferring to treat the new operating system's features as bullet points to sell replacement hardware.
In fact, if it couldn't be upgraded that would be better from a corporate standpoint because it would be a consistent platform.
Every iDevice sold since the App Store began operation in the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2 days can be upgraded to iOS 4. For this reason, app developers can more or less safely assume that anyone who bought an iDevice since the "there's an app for that" campaign either has or can get iOS 4 and can buy apps. Android, on the other hand, has a large proportion of handsets stuck at 1.6, and plenty of non-phone devices with no official access to Android Market. Google gives no information beyond "If you don't have access to Android Market, please contact your mobile service provider or device manufacturer for more information."
The finding were more OS specific, not hardware specific, although that too raised some minor questions about support.
The current model we use under the 'user supplied' mobile device program, requires each hardware model be approved for use by corporate security. Previously all hardware allowed to connect was company supplied but they relaxed that policy when the iPhone came out, and also for the iPad. The issue found with Android related to security updates. Although vulnerabilities were being reported for various versions of Android, some vendors were refusing to update the devices to a current version of Android which resolved the vulnerability. To compound matters, vendors were still releasing older versions of Android on new handsets. This isn't a ding on Google itself, but rather on the handset makers.
To a lesser degree, hardware was raised as a potential issue for our level 1 support, where a large variety of handsets with varying hardware configs, and potentially differences in core OS functionality might require more documentation to support.
The general decision was that they could work around the hardware differences and feature differences on varying Android OS releases, but the core vulnerabilities that a handset maker refused to address/update were a show stopper.
As to questions about 'forcing' users to buy a compliant handset, that would require a running list, and certifications on every Android handset as it was released so that our end users could look at a list and see which were company approved. No small task given the large number of handset vendors and models within those vendors, all running Android. It was simply deemed not worth the cost in man hours. Since the number of hardware models and OS versions for the iPhone are very uniform, this was not an issue. They picked a minimum hardware requirement, knowing that any new devices would meet that requirement going forward. RIM devices are still company supplied so no issue there as they only certify a small number of devices from that vendor.
This was not an issue of us saying we require version X, but rather dealing with end user confusion if we suddenly had to cut off version X simply because a vulnerability was exposed that the end user could not get an OS upgrade from the handset manufacturer that addressed it. This was not some sort of Android vs. iOS discussion, but rather simple supportability and cost effectiveness.
Hopefully that clarifies.
Because RMS already condemned it. And everything condemned by RMS has been proved to actually do the predicted damage. So chrome OS will probably live and thrive, and lure a lot of gullible users to trust their info and data in the cloud, and come back to bite them.
>> Surely the point is that Chrome OS allows Google and other devs to push the boundaries of what functionality can be contained within a web browser i.e. Chrome.
But is that a real problem? If the same functionality already exists in native applications on various platforms, is it really novel and does it matter that it can be "contained within a web browser"?
>> If they can demonstrate that hey, you can do facetube/music/pics etc quite happily within a browser then a Google user could get a very similar experience across multiple devices with the same access to their data.
Again, why is this important? If users can already do facetube/music/pics in Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and any other sort of device, including some television sets; why then is it even relevant to demonstrate that the same things--that people already do--can be done within a browser?
You're not even suggesting a superior experience, mind you. It seems generally acknowledged that the experience of moving a native application to a web-app is either inferior, or at best similar.
In this regard Google seems like a novice easily impressed by what he can do on the web. I remember the first time I coded an image roll-over in JavaScript sometime in the 90s: I thought that being able to make animations respond dynamically to user input was the coolest thing ever. That is, ignoring, of course, that complex, interactive multimedia had existed for a while already, and could do much more than that simple image trick. But the web was so spartan then that it felt as a significant accomplishment.
The lesson then, like with the so-called "cloud computing", is not that we should move everything to the web because now we can; but that perhaps the web is so spartan in many regards for a reason, and that there are already established platforms and other means to implement rich applications in more practical ways. That the WWW is finally catching up to them is really less exciting that what the hype suggests.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost