The Google Chrome OS is real, but it probably won’t be that big a deal for most people.
Oh, I mean, sure, it may be a raging success or a colossal failure (I really can’t see a middle ground on this) but so far, we have no screenshots, and not much information other than a post on the Google Blog which confirms the rumors: A Linux-based application which starts with low-power, high-connectivity “netbooks.”
Let’s talk a bit about what a “netbook” is. A netbook is a cheap laptop which is significantly underpowered compared to “notebook” brethren, and the users of the netbooks tend to not need support for peripherals nor, in many cases, any desktop applications. Netbooks are designed to browse the web and do cloud-based computing.
We’ve had the technology for netbooks for years (Mini-ITX boards with AMD Geode processors were around in 2002), but we never had the demand. The convergence of lowering hardware prices and a lowered need for desktop processing power resulted in a perfect storm where netbooks became economically feasible.
There’s still a demand for high-powered laptops – especially among space-cramped college students and young professionals who rent a room in a 4/4 condo with three roommates. But the high cost of the high-end of notebooks has had many people realizing they can buy a desktop computer for high-end applications which require tons of processing power, and use the netbook for connectivity on the go at the same, or lower, price.
It is into this market that Google is entering, and while cloud apps would have been possible without Google, it is Google’s cloud applications – which have recently come out of beta, by the way – which make the whole thing possible.
Is the development of a GoogleOS a broadside against Microsoft? No – I just think that Microsoft has too much inertia to be making anything other than big, monolithic desktop applications for the near future. They’ve built an entire corporate culture around the coding base. But desktop applications aren’t going away anytime soon.
There are advantages to be found away from the cloud as there are outside the cloud. Google Docs is great, but it’s not as full featured as Word, which provides features that you can only get in a desktop word processor. Only a small minority of people will need Word’s “data merge manager,” for example, but for them, the service is indispensible.
Essentially, the Google Chrome OS is tied to the fate of cloud computing applications.
Considering that the OS isn’t due out until 2010, and that the market for netbooks may have changed radically in that time, Google Chrome OS probably isn’t a Microsoft killer – or even a Microsoft wounder – as netbooks are too low-powered to run Windows Vista anyway.
But there is one problem. There are now multiple services trying to bring “cloud gaming” – fully rendered 3D gaming, running over the cloud, to gamers running on any type of hardware – whether or not they have powerful processors or graphics cards. Holding them back: network performance – games require very low latency.
However, if you can run a virtual game on a virtual server and send the pictures back as output, there really is no limit to the types of applications you can run – which include fuller featured word processors, presentation applications, photo manipulation, audio editing, video editing, even 3D rendering. The last two, specifically, would benefit greatly from cloud computing, as rendering can be solved by simply brute-forcing video compression. The development of Google Chrome OS – an OS without much, if any, desktop application support – seems like it’s the herald of a cloud-only world.
Except, of course, those virtual games on virtual servers still have to deal with latency, and those large HD files still have to be uploaded to the server – so limited by throughput that you’re better off rendering on your 8-core behemoth. Like all network applications, the real issue is performance. Cloud applications trade performance for convenience. That may be a sacrifice most are willing to make when looking for a netbook, but everyone has time to time to need a powerful computer.
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