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Going All-Google To Replace Your PC and TV Service
GMGruman writes "James Curnow writes 'Google's vision of computing involves tossing your PC or Mac and moving to a cloud-centric, all-Google ecosystem. Call it the Googleplex: a mix of the Chrome OS-based Chromebox PC or Chromebook laptop, one or more Android tablets — perhaps a 10-inch model for work and a 7-inch Nexus 7 for entertainment on the go — and a Nexus Q home entertainment system that you control via an Android device.' So he takes the 'Googleplex' for a test drive to see how well it delivers on the Android/Chrome OS vision."
But what about throwing xbmc or MythTV onto an old (or cheap new) box with a couple of huge drives (HDTV's being glorified monitors and all)?
No, thanks. Do not want!
... for advertisers.
But then the content would be cached in a large cheap local buffer, and not streamed from the cloud over bandwidth-constrained wired or wireless connections. Not only would MAFIAA not approve, but Google/Doubleclick wouldn't get analytics/metrics.
You didn't think that the availability of cheap general-purpose computing hardware was supposed to benefit the consumer, did you?
most of this set up. Google TV on my HDTV, an Android phone, and a Chromebook for the kitchen. And I like it... they're robust, functional, easy-to-use products.
Buy whatever electronic devices I find favorable, and configure them however the fuck I want.
That way I can avoid their "ecosystem", with its inherant vendor lock in, and pervasive bullshit entirely!
As a consumer, that sounds far more desirable.
However, I do see where other normal consumers may fall victim here, since getting all the equipment and services from a single company should (theoretically...) make setup and use easier.
Personally though? When I plop down on the couch to veggify some braincells, I want a few annoyances as possible, which mans the equipment has to do whar *I* want, and not what a bunch of shyster lawyers in hollywood, and a bunch of beancounters in the bay area google HQ want.
If that means DIY home theater with MythTV and a raid array, so fucking be it.
Google would like you to believe in a world where you get all of your media from their devices across the Internet. Unfortunately, that just doesn't work in the real world. The little old lady next door has already been hit with insane overage charges by AT&T because she dared to watch Netflix. Follow the Google vision and your overages will not only include things like Netflix but will include your own movies and even music unless you have an uncapped provider who you can believe will stay uncapped (AT&T only announced the caps last year). Maybe in Kansas City where Google offers fiber and doesn't impose monthly limits this would be a good thing, but not in the rest of America where our government grants monopolies to service providers but lets them chip away at the service rather than building out their networks.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I fear a world run by google and apple. They are both companies with a shiny outer layer and a dark dark underneath that won't be clear until it's too late to do anything about it.People need to remember that (especially google) the people using their services are not their customers, and that google doesn't owe them one thing. They will use every method at their disposal to be able to charge more for whatever advertising/marketing/human sorting they are working on that day. Nothing is free, you pay one way or another. Wether you pay with money or with your personal information, it's just the same.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
Not going to debate if its a good idea or not, as ISPs with their non-neutral bandwidth limits have eliminated this sort of option anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If that phrase indicates the author's grasp of technology I have no interest in what else they have to say.
If I had a "Chrome OS-based Chromebox PC or Chromebook laptop", would that not be by definition a PC? So I'd just be replacing my PC-with-one-OS with a PC-with-a-different-OS. Better than predictions that in the future we'll all be doing everything on little tablets (laughable), but still, no thanks.
I wonder how AC Neilsen feels about this. Why spend the big bucks Neilsen's market research on what people are watching -- when google can tell you what people are watching, and for less?
Seriously: a 10" tablet for work is a joke. Even one 24" 1920x1200 monitor is a chore sometimes.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
What's a TV?
Google is spyware
I've had a chance to play with a Chromebook, and yeah, it's a very well designed product. But I remain skeptical about its commercial success. There's too much lockin to PC-based applications, and people are much too thoroughly trained in non-cloud file systems. This may well change, but I wouldn't bet on it happening soon.
Call it the Googleplex: a mix of the Chrome OS-based Chromebox PC or Chromebook laptop, one or more Android tablets
No, let's not. First of all The Googleplex is the longstanding name of the Google campus. The more appropriate name for this vision is GoogleBorg.
Secondly, as others have pointed out, many more people than marketeers want us to believe want large screens for our movies, without concern for buffering, delayed starts, stuttering, low resolution or concern that leaving the TV on all day will bust an ISP-bill-cap in our ass.
For computing, us nonconformist Google and tablet holdouts still like our computers to have large screens and physical keyboards. We also like having at least a copy of our files stored locally for immediate and unfettered access. Perhaps we could access the files on our local computer via a tablet for our own convenience. Shock!
Many of us don't trust Google and folding all of our services into Google's hands is not an option that we will even debate. Let alone the inherent and demonstrable issues like; Google perceives a violation of their ToS in your Google+ account and locks your account barring your ability to access your files or email, watch television, use a computer, etc. And whose tech support would you call when this happens?
No, this twits vision of GoogleBorg will never be allowed to happen, even if it is what Google hopes for.
I don't like using software that depends on online connections to operate. Connections are not fast enough or reliable enough. Nor are they secure. Compute Locally.
The Googleplex solution is currently too limited and won't let normal users do a lot of what they'll want to do. But if you like incessantly fiddling around, this may sort of work for you.
(I cheated and read the article - sorry)
#DeleteChrome
And how long can you browse without AdBlock turned on before you go nuts?
I don't use an ad blocker; I just use an SWF blocker, which keeps advertising at a tolerable level. If advertisers have something substantial to say, surely they can boil it down to text or a still JPEG, and if so, let 'em. Flash ads are for video sites like YouTube and Newgrounds.
As long as we're talking Android, a tablet is the perfect work device - small, portable, thin, light weight device. We only make the comment that a tablet isn't suitable for work on iPad stories to dissuade people from buying Apple.
Whenever an organization claims a particular course of action, drift to complete opposition is not uncommon. Maybe it just seems that way but... remember when Wal Mart sourced everything from within the US? It was part of their mission statement. Then Sam died and the rest is history.
When Google came along with "don't be evil", I was like "oh crap". I saw this coming; but I'm still amazed at how quickly they're going that way, especially with their desire finagle into payment systems and extract a hipster tax from everybody.
So I'd just be replacing my PC-with-one-OS with a PC-with-a-different-OS.
You'd be replacing your PC with a different PC that can't use common peripherals such as a flatbed scanner or a webcam. I've noticed that some employers are starting to require people to have a webcam on their home PC to get or keep a job. And until some counterpart to AIDE comes out, you'd be replacing your PC with something that can't even self-host its own developer tools.
As far as I can tell, the biggest danger that alarmists cite about a "post-PC" world is that the price of a PC will shoot up due to loss of economies of scale. For people who need a high-end PC and are willing to pay for one, like people who do industrial CAD for a living, those will still be available.
[TV] was slowly phased out in favor of superior offerings toward the end of the 20th century.
It was a little later than the 1990s, as you claim. I'd say around 2006 is when TVs started to be replaced with large computer monitors that had a built-in TV receiver for backward compatibility. Some parts of your vision are still taking a while to happen: it's taking a long time for high-speed Internet access without a harsh cap to reach rural areas, and a lot of people are still reluctant to connect a general-purpose computer to a living-room-sized monitor.
that I have not owned a TV in 10 years. and I am in my late 20th. google is not going to change that.
Google's a huge company now that's under revenue pressures. They need to sell more ads and access to private info to advertisers (their customers). Google's the company that's caused more privacy violations and paid out more fines to FTC than any other company in history.
I still use Google search but that's about it. I've ditched all other google services for other, more privacy friendly, alternatives.
Chrome OS is not a computing environment, but an appliance that happens to run on a (poor poor wasted) computer.
If you can replace your PC with it, you never were a computer user in the first place, and I want you to hand in your geek card.
A real computer user automates his work away. Instead of complaining that the computer saves the work we wouldn't have without it.
You literally tell it what to do (as in a shell script or customized software), and when to do it (e.g. an udev event or cron job), and then sit back, relax, and enjoy.
I can't stand watching a freely programmable computer being crippled like that. It's such a waste of freedom and power...
We should stop referring to such devices as computers. They are information and entertainment appliances. Otherwise we confuse computer literacy with being able to use MS Office.
I find myself wondering if they have a patent for it.
I am not just going to agree with the popular view. In other words I have bad Karma.
Cell phone crappy camera instead of a good camera. And now: TA DA!!! Watching video on a 7-in screen. I'm too old for this nonsense.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
You might want to ask the teenager who wasn't ready to tell her parents she was pregnant
She told them because she wanted to. Not because she HAD to. Otherwise she could have just said "I don't know why I'm getting this stuff". I mean, it's just advertising. Why would her parents not have believed her?
In that scenario Target was worse off than the girl, because the parents were angry with them at first.
(advertising goes to work not home - for example ads in a browser when your boss walks in)
How is that going to happen? Are you logging on to personal websites at work? If it's cookie based stuff, how would it follow you there?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not if that content is copyrighted.
Dude! That makes NO SENSE. The key is in that first part of the term, "COPYright".
If material is copyrighted you can't re-distribute it, but you can sure as hell block, mangle or ignore it locally as you please.
Hulu Plus is... I canceled it after less than a month of using it.
Yet millions do in fact pay for it so we can see how far off the norm you are in regards to advertising.
And how long can you browse without AdBlock turned on before you go nuts?
I don't use any ad-blockers because I like the sites I enjoy, all free, to continue to exist.
But realistically they way I tolerate the web is to have a flash-blocker on. That gets rid of the really obnoxious stuff, especially pop-unders (yes I have popup blocking enabled, but I just click randomly on paged I read out of habit and that often triggers pop-unders).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The more differentiation between goods, the more likely people are to have a strong preference.
Consider Coke and Pepsi. The difference between them really is minor, and yet they evoke incredibly strong preferences in just about anyone I've ever met.
although there's still a lot of impulse buying, it is mostly for stuff that would piss people off if they had to watch ads for it, like laundry detergent.
Are you sure about that? People seem to hold strongly onto laundry detergent brands.
These days, the ads people would choose to watch, if they were allowed to choose ads (but were forced to watch ads), would be ads for products that are actually interesting.
So what is interesting about deodorant? And yet - Old Spice Guy.
If the only advertising that will work anymore is interesting advertising, then that is the ad agencies job, to make ANY product advertising interesting. There is no product so lowly or humble that interesting advertising cannot be created for it. The days where you could simply slap a logo up and people would be forced to stare at it for 20 seconds are over, so the advertising industry has to adapt. But it can, we have already seen it do so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just record ATSC off the air (using a USB widget, VLC and cron). It's inexpensive and no Big Brother.
Every huge technology company (Or in googles case advertising company) wants total control over all your gear and your data.
Being honest and telling everyone this is actually your plan or that this model somehow represents the future and you will like it is an interesting strategy however the answer is still "no".
This is for googles own good too. The more we stand by and help google corrupt its own soul the worse off everyone including google is in the long run.
Replace my primary data storage with cloud services? Not a chance. Run my applications cloud-based off cloud-based storage rather than on local storage? No, that's way too slow; even serving disks across Wifi is slow. Not only is it not cost-effective, and not performance-effective, but more importantly, I don't control my data that way.
Get most of my TV from Google/Hulu/Netflix/etc. instead of Comcast? Meh. Most of it's probably there, and digital broadcast TV probably looks better than analog most of the time, but still, it doesn't strike me as worth the trouble.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
IMO, Coke and Pepsi taste nothing alike. Coke has a much stronger bite to its flavor—almost a tartness—that Pepsi does not have. They are a commodity from a functional perspective. From a flavor perspective, not so much.
Yes, I'm sure. People typically buy what they are used to buying, so the main advantage to advertising of products in an established commodity market is hooking new buyers who haven't formed an opinion yet or to introduce new products.
Nothing. Which is why I haven't put up with watching a deodorant ad in about ten years.
Your threshold for "interesting" must be a lot lower than mine. Unless I'm either learning something new or being seriously entertained, it isn't interesting. And nobody seems to care about the first one, which pretty much leaves "seriously entertained". Statistically speaking, such ads, though memorable, don't result in a lasting brand impression, which makes them not particularly useful.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
To put it simply, try downloading over the Internet when your Internet connection is down. That's the great thing about local storage.
"HDTV's being glorified monitors and all"? Isn't putting an apostrophe there considered incorrect?
This is what it's all about, the fact people are too lazy to bend their neck, and line the mouse up with the full screen button, on which ever player, webpage, is loaded up.
The fact that people are too stupid to install a capture card, or a tuner card, or just edit their own card's settings and plug a fucking TV in, the fact that people are too stupid to convert one signal to another, using a 4 channel video/audio switch, or too cheap to buy a couch mouse.
Google puts all these problems into a one box solution, such solutions are never perfect, neither is MythTV or XMBC. But if you HATE GOOGLE for other reasons, this isn't a solution, it's a fucking nightmare as far as dumbing down the sheep.
Does all this BS ultimately end up with worthless machines that can't capture, edit, or produce video/audio, and only consume the shit coming out the ass of the powers that be. If that's the world they got planned, I'm yanking all my net connections until the collapse.
What I don't understand is why not arrest the fuckers running our country now, They're already guilty dirty filthy oath breakers, instead of waiting until the military upholds continuity of government after the collapse because of their malicious activities. Do you WANT to fight a civil war and live in a FEMA CAMP?
Stop BUYING shit from these fuckers. I have a damaged neck, and still I can bend it just enough to move the fucking mouse!!!
WHICH employers require (!) a webcam at home for employment?
Any company whose HR department uses HireVue, for one thing.
The otherwise far-sighted, prescient GNU project and their GPL never imagined anyone would take a GNU/Linux PC and cripple it to make it a walled garden. So far, this has been the paradigm followed by Apple (Mac and other BSD stuff), Google (ChromeOS), Amazon (their middleman browser), etc. They've taken open source software and turned it into the very thing open source was meant to stop from happening, the locked-down walled garden.
Your threshold for "interesting" must be a lot lower than mine.
Very likely, mine I think is just about perfectly average, which makes me a great leading indicator of what ads will be popular - any ads I like have invariably been widely liked. I enjoy analyzing ads and thinking about why they might work or not.
However, I cannot believe you can talk about advertising without acknowledging the massive success that was the Old Spice Guy. If you don't understand what happened there, I don't think you know the face of modern advertising or what has been successful.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google and others will then watch you watch your TV.
Of course, the cable companies already do that, and there is a database of what you watch that they can sell to advertisers now.
I don't even know what the "Old Spice Guy" is. That line of ads didn't have enough impact to get even a single mention by anyone I know, including my 459 Facebook friends, or any of the folks I converse with around the halls at work, or at church, or.... So maybe the line of ads was effective among the market segment who actually still watches commercials, but that market segment is rapidly dwindling.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I don't even know what the "Old Spice Guy" is. That line of ads didn't have enough impact to get even a single mention by anyone I know, including my 459 Facebook friends, or any of the folks I converse with around the halls at work
And yet if you asked 90% would know what I am talking about.
It was huge at the time, and it is the future of advertising. If you truly never heard of it, you cannot possibly know what is to come.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, other than the fact that Chrome OS can certainly use a webcam.