Up until today I had sort of discounted Chrome OS as a potential game changer, but after spending an hour watching their keynote tonight I can honestly say it is quite amazing to look at all of the pieces of the puzzle come together in a multi-billion dollar chess match that has Apple and Microsoft lined up against them.
But one thing in my household has really changed what I think of Cloud computing. I can count on one hand how many times my wife has had to use her Mac Book Pro in the past year since I purchased her a iPad. She simply loves the device and even canceled her phones data plan and only uses the iPad for the high majority of her computing needs.
My bet is the Chrome OS echo system is going to explode over the next 12 months and that a huge number of start-ups are going to get funded that do nothing but build applications for Chrome OS.
While I doubt that I will ever be able to walk away from using a powerful desktop or laptop but even I find myself in the cloud a lot more than I used to. This video is very compelling. But I can tell you what I will be buying on June 15th and it will be a Chrome OS laptop.
One thing as well Chrome OS developers are going to be very busy!
Google is pushing a lot of hype about Chrome but it’s still just a web browser. Is a netbook that boots to a web browser worth $400? Not in a world where tablets are the light computing hardware of choice. I have a feeling that Samsung will soon feel like Logitech did after the Google TV launch. Google should be focusing on tablets with Android and continue with Chrome as just a downloadable browser.
The difficulty I have with the Chromebooks is that I wonder who will buy them. Living in the web is a great aspiration but there’s still a fair bit that doesn’t fit. One big stumbling block must be iPods and iTunes – whose going to buy one of these if you can get your music across to your player?
Then there’s the price – it’s not far off a (Windows-based) netbook / laptop that can do everything or from a different point of view, allow you to choose how you do things.
Finally, there’s the rise of the tablet. There’s no doubt that the Chromebooks can be thin and svelte because there’s not much in them, but if I wanted thin and svelte, would I not get a tablet?
I’m afraid that I’m not convinced – I think it’s trying change a paradigm in a form factor that’s already out of date. But if anyone can make it happen, it’s probably Google.
Perhaps this is why Rovio’s developing a web version of Angry Birds….
It’s a fantastic amalgamation but I have one reservation to the world of off-device storage and that’s Google themselves.
I am very concerned that the instant that data is on their servers it’s no longer mine, that is to say it will be mined, along with gmail and every other Google service.
I would be a lot more comfortable if the data could be stored on Google’s servers using an encryption that they themselves do not provide. Until that facility exists there is absolutely no way I am going to extend my activities beyond a gmail account that is used for capturing spam mail and sign-ups for non-critical websites.