Google Chrome OS: I Don’t Get It
November 20th, 2009
I guess Google’s browser-only OS is not for people like me, because I’m scratching my head trying to understand the point.
Basically, it’s a web browser that is the OS. Which means throwing out all your desktop apps. Easier said than done, right there. I’d love to lie and say I spend 100% of my time in the browser, but I don’t. iTunes, Photoshop, Office, VLC, Twitter clients, BBEdit, Flash, are jumping in constantly.
Google seems to believe I’d be willing to toss out all my traditional desktop apps in exchange for speed and less viruses. I’m on a Mac (no viruses) and the Internet feels generally fast enough for me. So what’s the benefit of having no apps and a really fast browser vs. a complete OS with tons of apps and a slightly less fast, but still really fast browser? This trade-off makes less sense the more I think about it. And I think they overestimate how much time average people spend in the browser.
And even on the iPhone – which isn’t a computer – it’s the same story. I can’t give up the apps. And then add in the iPhone’s iPod functions, playing back all the music and video stored on it. The iPhone is important to consider because it’s essentially my “netbook.” I’ve given up wanting a netbook because as far as mobile computing goes, the iPhone more than suffices.
Imagine if Apple released an iPhone that only had Safari on it. That’s it. No apps. No iPod functionality. And we had to make do with web apps. I wouldn’t buy such a thing, not after getting used to the Swiss-army wonderment of the iPhone.
As far as I’m concerned, the Google Chrome OS seems limiting at best, and at worst, pointless. I don’t get it.
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[...] Google Chrome OS: I Don’t Get It – webomatica And we had to make do with web apps. I wouldn’t buy such a thing, not after getting used to the Swiss-army wonderment of the iPhone. [...]
I absolutely agree with you. Chrome OS is definitely not meant for me, either.
Google's obsession with the browser goes back to the company's founding, and it makes sense, when you consider that Google's only profit center is advertising on the web. But assuming that everyone wants to spend all of his or her time in the browser is ludicrous to me.
I don't even use GMail in the browser. I greatly prefer a dedicated mail application. Google Docs is a cool idea, in theory, and it's fine for the occasional document I want to share, but 999 times out of 1000, I'm far happier in Pages or Numbers.
To me, a web app always requires some form of compromise over a dedicated application. No matter how good HTML 5 is, any app in the browser is no match for a real app. As far as I'm concerned, it's a completely unnecessary compromise. Because my Mac can do both just fine.
The only “app” in the browser that makes sense to me is an RSS reader. Since I'm clicking on links to articles that are on the web anyway, it makes sense to do that right within the browser. I search for things. I read my feeds. I get maps and directions. That's about it.
So, like you said, what's the point of a computer that's even less powerful than my iPhone? I, too, already feel like my iPhone is better than any netbook would be. It's more than powerful enough for my email and 24/7 communications needs, and it fits into my jeans pocket.
I think with Chrome OS Google is trying to put just one more nail into the coffin of Microsoft. MS's strategy with Windows 7 is to push the price of netbooks upward, because they're getting killed by having to offer XP for practically nothing on netbooks now to compete with Linux. They're hoping the lure of Windows 7 will be enough to get people to stop being cheapskates all of a sudden.
If Google can generate enough buzz around Chrome OS and keep prices of netbooks down by outselling Microsoft, Microsoft doesn't stand a chance of maintaining its market share, even in the least profitable market of computing. (They've already lost the high-profit market to Apple.)
And why does Google care so much about killing Microsoft, while they seem to have little problem with Apple? In a word, Bing.
Apple doesn't have a search engine. They make no money in online advertising, and don't seem to have any plans to in the future. But Microsoft is hellbent on owning everything Google does. Office Live, Bing—they even had their own YouTube wannabe site that they had to shut down eventually.
If you ask me, if Microsoft were to replace that default bing search field in IE with Google, as it is in Safari and Firefox, Google would drop Chrome OS tomorrow. But that's not going to happen.
So Chrome makes sense in that regard, I guess. But the thing I don't get is why they don't just use Android for that purpose. Android is flexible enough to be run on a netbook. There are already a few netbook/tablet computers coming that run Android. Why not push that angle, so that you can present one unified OS, still give it away for free so MS can't compete, still push browsing and search to drive in profits, give your users access to all those great Android apps, give the Android developers a larger market to sell to, and help win the handheld war while you're winning the netbook war?
Seems like Google has a really disjointed strategy right now. Unless there's some secret method to this madness that will be revealed at a later date, I don't think it makes much sense. It could be that Google is simply scared that it only knows how to make money via ads in browsers. And thus, the only way to thrive is to drive everyone to the browser for absolutely everything. In which case, the long-term strategy would be to migrate Android over to Chrome OS for phones, as well. But that's a hard sell.
After more head scratching and reading your comment – one possibility is Google's engineer-centric product development. The Chrome OS sounds like an engineer (or web developer) wet dream. It has that absolutist feeling of, let's just do everything in the browser; it will be so great. But don't stop to ask the question of if it being something people actually want. Wave also smacks of this technically impressive but commercially questionable thinking. But the average consumer doesn't buy into the future based on principle alone, there's got to be a *reason*, a use, a purpose, a benefit for giving up the past.
Maybe Google needs to work on making a transition from desktop to web less of a trade-off. I think about how Apple eased people to OS X from OS 9 by developing Classic and then to Intel, using Rosetta. It was comforting to know that Apple anticipated people freaking out about losing legacy support. Maybe more web based apps that further drive the point home that desktop apps are on the way out.
The Bing angle definitely makes some sense; Google feels like it has to apply pressure to Microsoft somewhere in return.
I dont know where you get some of your information from but it is very misguided. Everybody has been going on about Linux destroying Microsoft for years and it has not happened, they have made tiny inroads but nothing compared to what they had hoped for. High end market? In what aspect do you mean? In the U.S a reasonable market share but in other place it does not.
People are desperate for Microsoft to fall flat on it's face yet are happy for 'Google' to take over everything, not realizing they have acted in pretty much the same way as MS. Take a look at the book idea they are touting, this kind of thing really should not be happening, especially when you examine the things that MS has been criticized for over the years. I read somewhere that somebody was stating IE popularity had fallen to 44%, this is simply not true, it has fallen but not this much. Take a note of this, Firefox has recently reached 1-billion downloads after five years, which sounds great! However, Internet Explorer 8 reached 200-million downloads after just 4-months! I think this really puts things into perspective. M$ is not going to disappear in the near future and is probably going to be around for a long time yet. Recently it has suffered financially, as have most companies, but M$ also has an absolutely enormous war chest of money to help it keep ahead. Sorry but I thought I had better bring a bit of reality into this.
[...] I’ve been reluctant to get on the whole “cloud computing” bandwagon. I still don’t really get the benefit of having all your productivity stuff up in some server somewhere vs. working locally, I worry about security, like having local files that I control and for all the time spent in a web browser, an equivalent amount is spent offline doing stuff to said files. [...]