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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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