Google Chrome OS - do we want another monoculture?

ALL YOUR INFORMATIONS ARE BELONG TO... Mountain View

Everything a Chrome user does will be on the Google cloud.

What will Mountain View do with this information?

Thanks, guys, but no thanks!

good...i think...

hmmm ok i think I like google chrome os idea....if its associated with a nice cheap little device say < £100 then id buy it no problem...

It's just enough operating system to run a browser, a display screen and a wireless network card and thats it really, i can live with that if it's a gadget...hell my dear old mum could live with that easily...

I could see these devices selling if the are nice cheap little netbooks (< £100) for just surfing the net...sure its not a full blown os but it's running a device thats meant for a single purpose, google chrome os devices surf the net, a cd player plays cd's...

devices based around google chrome os are not meant to be multipurpose devices that can write cd's, print etc...

shotgun, meet foot........

"We really want software to understand the underlying hardware so we can make it much faster and more secure. It's an important part of what we're trying to do,"

Hmmmm, Someones being sucking at the teet of Jobsian economics ;-) Next thing you know they'll be some distribution deals and they will be selling "Google-branded" PC's at inflated costs..... sound familiar?

"This is exactly what they want.

They just want to connect to the web and dick around with their photos & music. They want it to be completely non-technical and idiot proof."

Trouble is, they also want to dick around with photos and music once their crappy £25 freebie ISP router dies / needs rebooting.

I concur with Missing the Point (11:06 GMT)

mostly because this is a new technology aimed at diverse audience using new user hardware (ie new hardware to new user).

The previously mentioned appeal to large organisations needing to access information securely yet on a mobile basis could use an insecure laptop (or top up a wee bit to increase the probability of locating a missing or misplaced laptop) OR a secure netbook.

It also has appeal (or so I'd posit) towards naive users. People that want to use computers for the content rather than swishness, complexity, synergy, ecology and ecosystem(s) of application(s).

"I'm not too bothered what application displays my daily newspaper/magazine/ ... / I just want to be sure that it's there when I want it."

This technology is probably far more important now in order for it to be mainstream, say, 10 years from now.

There were times in the past when radios (wireless devices) had a similar sort of hardware spread (and similar sort of hardware supporters): super-heterodynes, regenerative systems, feedback systems, ... and that was important at the time [a bit like VHS or Betamax were] But that is not important now as the technology has matured.

I imagine it is much the same with netbooks, Chrome OS, Android OS, ...

The success will be when nobody really knows or cares what the OS is or what the applications are. All that matters is content is streamed pleasantly to end user and it synergises well with desktop units? A bit like television for example?

@ Geoff Campbell

"With lightweight reference hardware and a free OS, you could end up with netbooks costing £50-100. Still so sure they'll tank?"

Yes. Firstly, because who wants to pay *anything* for a computer that can only do half the stuff that a computer should do, and which can only be used in any meaningful way when you have a working internet connection?

Secondly, because your grasp of economics seems a bit tenuous. The basic cost of components, manufacturing and shipping on most netbooks is not going to be much under £100. OEMs have already tried to make them cheap by using Linux (which is also free) and lightweight hardware (basic off-the-rack hadware, cheaper than the google-specific hardware Chrome OS will need). You're also not considering the fact that this thing *has to* have an SSD, which immediately pushes the price up.

The bottom line is, by the time you factor in all the R&D that will need to go into developing the hardware to work with the OS, you're going to be saving almost no money as against a netbook running XP/Win7/Ubuntu/Whatever... and at least those operating systems will be able to do useful stuff say, when you're on the tube, or on an aeroplane, or simply out of wireless range & connectivity.

So yes, in brief, I'd say that ChromeOS machines wil tank unless Google comes up with some much more compelling reasons to buy them...

Pleeeeease

Wont someone think of the children...

can you imagine, you have to be connected 100% of the time,

all those (reg) weirdo's out there, pretending to be santa/Peado's/fluffy the bunny who ever!,

connected all the time too,

its just going to end in tears!, no child monitoring here..!

Bandwidth?

How will most people cope with their shitty 2gb ISP bandwidth allowances?

Surely a cloud based systems would burn through that at an alarming rate?

elREG gone anti-Google

What's with all the anti-Google stories recently ?

off-line issue

I don't know if the posters are just "localhost" coders (understandably scared of the web) or is it that I am at fail to understand the information given.

The system will have a "caching" feature, I believe this means the files actually being worked on will be saved on the netbook. I also believe the latest and up to date version of certain applications will also be installed locally, hence the existence of the "httpd" and "sqlite" on the tree (as someone mentioned above).

It is still a bit of an indecent proposal (meaningful though if one runs a company), given that google will be the sole software provider by the looks of it, but it opens the door to an idea that people should have developed already instead of copying whatever is around (win, mac, linux).

Why do most of you omit the "cache" feature? I don't think google are that stupid so as to provide a OS that requires always-on internet. And if they were they must have realised by now that it would be no good.

I also think that the more competition in the OS and browser marketplace the better, more fingers sharing the pie and more innovation ahead.

I'll get my bullet-proof coat just in case.

Um ...

"But we really focus on user needs."

Since we're all geeks, nerds, and w@nkers here, does that mean they'll be coming out with a line of Personality Implants and Google Fashion Sense?

Cheers, it's the weekend.

Mobile devices...

...load any app you want, develop easily, works even when not connected, free of Mr.Jobs..

...Maemo and the N900 ???

Um, Why?

So Google are positioning the devices running Chrome OS as MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) which you carry with you all the time and can access Web-based stuff.

Sorry Google, but that's called a smartphone (and as a bonus, you get "added phone"). They already exist and everyone that needs/wants one pretty much has one. But you know this already because you created Android.

In my view the following market does not exist:

People that want a device that lets them access the Internet whenever they want, but are unwilling to buy a smartphone. Or, to put it another way, people that want a smartphone that isn't a phone.

OK, so the plenty of people buy an iPod Touch, but that plays music, videos, games, etc. and anyone who has one instead of a smartphone almost certainly doesn't care about Web apps.

so let me get this straight

If you cant get on the internet -you cant use your computer?

and this is just for netbooks?

well i hope it comes with a free 3G internet service since the only one in the UK is expensive - i paid £10 for3GB of traffic.

netbooks - portable computers for use when your out and about- when your out and about you dont have access to your home broadband connection.

this smells like either a HUGE fail or they are not telling us the whole story yet.

my first opinion, and first opinions count, is that this is a huge waste of everones time.

Thin Clients Suck

I suspect anyone who gets this is going to quickly discover that thin clients just don't work. How about the first time you don't have connectivity and your laptop is no more than a door stop. What happens when your cable/ADSL goes down for a day, or when you are on a plane, etc. Then worse still, what about all those disk space intensive things. How about when you download 200 photos from your 10 mega-pixel camera and find that you spend ages uploading them to picasa. Then when you try to print them you find that the reduction in quality of the upload process has made them all grainy and you have deleted your originals off the memory card.

It's a bad idea and rather doomed to failure...

Nothing is ever [well, hardly ever] as it seems.

"..always remember that Google is, at heart, an advertising company."

Err, you might find that that is a convenient front and spying and phishing is their real game.

So -it does not really compete with Win7 & Snow does it?

as I said, So -it does not really compete with Win7 & Snow does it?

all that hype for a damp squid

No more browswer-only systems please

"Chrome (the browser) isn't all bad but the users seem to be adopting the arrogance of circa 1995 Linux users."

Oh not just them -- there were SEVERAL of these products that came out in the 1990s.. "Oh all people need is a browser". They were replacements for *desktops* instead, but they flopped too. As will this I think.

I like Google, but people aren't going to buy a netbook that *only* runs a browser, when they can buy a netbook that has a browser *and* can do other stuff.

"And while we're at it, can someone out there PLEASE make an alternative OS that isn't yet another Linux clone? I still remember the high hopes out there for Be, and even the Mac Classic OS was something different. Now we have an endless stream of Franken Distros that are someone's "improvements" on Linux. Just condense all the effort into 3 or 4 distros, not 400, otherwise it's just some cruel version of the Monty Python spam skit."

Well, there are just 3 or 4 *main* distros. I'd say Ubuntu (with the Debian base), SuSE, Redhat(/Fedora) are 3 big ones. There will always be a bunch of special-purpose distros and people working on new ones -- which often don't pan out after like 6 months.

I agree with you, but the Linux kernel is flexible, you wouldn't have to have what is even recognizable as a Linux distro on top of it. Although most do. I think people use it now for driver support -- it'd be hard to write something like BeOS now and then have to write all those drivers for the huge varieties of hardware on the market. Whereas, modifying a Linux kernel to use a BeOS-compatible API and behavior? Probably easier.

As for MacOS Classic -- don't go there. No memory protection, no multitasking (the multifinder used cooperative task switching, it relies entirely on the app giving up it's timeslice -- if it doesn't the whole system locks.) No scalable fonts (Adobe Type Manager added this). People are all nostalgic for it but it was not too good.

I agree though, it was much more interesting back in the day when there was more variety -- in the 80s when there was Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, PC, plus the 8-bits, that was REALLY interesting times.

"My sister rang last night: her PC has slowed to an unusable crawl. I think I've worked it out - I think it's some techobollocks like "AVG9 has re-enabled link scanning" - but how exactly she could ever have worked that out herself, worked out why her £500 PC is suddenly completely, totally useless, perhaps you could enlighten me?)"

I'll enlighten you, it's because it's running Windows. These things do not happen to Linux or Mac users (let alone BSD, etc.) Seriously, I run my Linux boxes HARD, haven't reinstalled some of them in over 5 years (just updates), added tons of apps over the years, and do not run into these problems. My parents have Ubuntu boxes, no problems. My sister had Ubuntu and now has a Mac (after her Windows PC she got in between blew up in less than a month). I don't expect people to solve these problems. But the choice isn't "Windows" or "stripped out browser PC".

"(See? To you, it's "tiny issue, trivial fix"; to her, and the rest of the 90% of normal users, it's "PC unfixably broken".)"

Nope, I don't fix that kind of stuff any more. I have people come in all the time DESPERATE for someone to fix their broken Windows box. Nobody here in town does it any more -- the most competent computer users abandonded Windows for Linux or Mac years ago (gaming? Xbox360 or PS3...), and the remainder are "wipe and reinstall" types. But again, it's not "Windows" or "browser OS", there's plenty of choice.

I see far too many people that complain the computer "breaks" all the time, I suggest a solution (Ubuntu or Mac), they say they "need" Windows (despite just browsing the web and word processing, and perhaps IM...). This type gets absolutely no sympathy from me. They make their bed and they can sleep in it.

Aren't we forgetting something?

Didn't / don't most of us (by that I mean IT professionals) spend a good deal of our working lives, regardless of whether it's our job to or not, helping users / friends / family to keep their computers free of spyware? Software (virii) which steals their information and passes it to people who probably want it for the sole reason of making money out of it at any cost?

With that in mind, how many of us would seriously recommend a system where all your information is held centrally by a large corporation who make their money from putting adverts which are as specific to you as possible in front of you? They already track how people "move" online to target adverts better, what is to stop them trawling the data which users (and according to one comment farther up, rather worryingly, Government Departments) are WILLINGLY giving them? Seriously, why wouldn't they? It's their business, it's what they do, why pass up the opportunity to charge more for their advertising service?

I don't like Microsoft or Apple much either, but seriously, Google is taking the concept of "evil" to a whole new level.

At least with Microsoft / Apple, I know I can always secure my private documents permanently, all I need to do is pull the network cable. And guess what? The computer will still pretty much have all the same functionality it did before, which is significantly more than what Chrome OS sounds like it will have.

How do I use it on the train with no net connection

Or on the bus, or tube, or doctors waiting room, or on a park bench or at my friends house who doesn't know his WEP key or anywhere that doesn't have an internet conenction which where I live is pretty much everywhere.

And no, I'm not in deepest darkest Peru but Surrey, just 20 miles South of London.

3rd world computing?

how will this do in the "3rd world"?

Web device

Well, not too bad for a (nearly) web-only device. Thing is, such a thing would have to be really cheap for people to risk buying such a limited device. They are trying to make a network appliance. Question is: is there a market for it? If yes, they have a good thing. If not...

@El Reg

"but there's still a fair mount if the Apple in its approach to hardware"

What in hell was that even suppose to mean?

El Reg's read-proofing has been slipping more and more lately. Really throws off a non-native speaker like me, who have to re-read the thing two or three time to try to decipher whether it's my bad understanding or the sentence is mangled. There's rarely an article here nowadays that is lacking typos, missing words, extra words or strange combinations. Hence the pedant icon. :-)

@AC Re Thin Clients don't fly...

When I read the article I was going to post a big yawn because McNealy and Larry was already here 10+ years ago.

But the big difference between then and now is that there is more bandwidth available. (Read Cheap Broadband), WiFi and WiMax for wireless connectivity exist today when they didn't yesterday.

And then there's this guy called Moore who has this 'law'... ;-) Yes, today's hardware is x^4 more powerful than when Larry and Scott pushed their idea.

So yeah, Google didn't invent this idea, they just applied existing/old ideas that were ahead of their time.

It will be interesting to see if someone hacks their distro and releases their own distro that will allow certain traffic to be filtered and or encrypted.

I mean heck when you use Google Docs, you store your document on google. How secure is it? But what happens if your document isn't auto saved back to google and the only copy on google is encrypted?

I wonder if google will then 'outlaw' such a distro and refuse to communicate with it.

The point is that thin clients may fly in certain situations, just that I don't trust Google.

Konsole-ayshun?

OK, imagine it was not google behind a novel netbook that for brevity and user security was tied in to its own hardware and supportive cloud.

For a second, a moment or a twinkling of earth time imagine thus:

Microsoft bring out its new operating system designed for netbooks, tied in to hardware and stored on MS's cloud.

Oh, some people don't like that one either?

Let's imagine now it is Appl - oh! shock horror me!

Some people don't like that one either?

Shiver me timbers and let's try Ubunt - ah. It too is equally vocally unliked.

At this point I tend to reflect back upon some comments that human gene pool has 2% variation as a result of humans disliking anything different [speculative I know, but it shows up oh so frequently with big fingerprints here and there that Sherlock Holmes might not even have to struggle to find not easily]

Yes and true it will take new connectivity issues, and yes there are likely to be costing issues and coverage issues.

But who said being human was easy?

What is life without challenge?

Once more into the breach

http://www.liebreich.com/LDC/HTML/Opinion/Iraq/Breach.html

{the link is rather tenuous and mostly [I hope] poetic?}

Do not want

That is all.

Smoke and mirrors

Cade touches on the subject all to briefly: Google is spanking the chrome monkey hard during Microsoft's week. It's not about facts (hard or floppy, phnarr) but about headlines and presumably OEM deals. ARM Cortex machines are consumers wet dreams but with no usable OS. In steppeth known brand bringing known shit (ever seen Merkens in foreign lands heading to McDonalds because even though it's shit, it's the shit they know?).

Android has been an incredible success in the short time it's been around. It's success has certainly surprised me, but then I've been wrong about many things. No reason to doubt that Google won't get manufacturers and network operators on board this time as well: the brand is worth a fuck of a lot. The Google top might cost € 300 in the shops but it might also be "free" on contract. The market for cheap shit is always there. Expect lots more "news" on Chrome over the coming months. An interesting market will be set-top boxes and phones as anyone who follows Opera may have noticed: exactly the market that Microsoft vainly pursued with Web-TV is now out there. There you are watching you're favourite programme or wanking over your favourite porn star on the big screen with constant e-mail and tw*tter updates.

But I've also got to moan:

"Given a web based / low cost / low carbon impact / secure (data held centrally) / low management device priced per user per month from a well respected Brand, which government director would not sign on the dotted line especially if the data was held in a secure Government Clould managed by Google?"

I've got to assume this was trolling by someone who (rightly) thinks we don't need to have this announced as it's complete load of cock: "secure ... cloud managed by Google" has got to be one of the oxymorons of this still young millenium! Interesting how many pro-Google posts are from "anonymous cocksuckers"

A pint of Frankenheim Alt, if you're asking.

@ John Gathercole: well-said that man. The same goes to the rare few who cut through the crap.

@ those mourning BeOS: Haiku is alive and well and runs on lots of hardware. http://haiku-os.org

Computer as a comminucations device

The computer is morphed into being a communications device. Sure you may be communicating documents or videos, entertainment. Forget about it really driving other stuff, cause that not what people want.

Not a bad concept really, as that's what most people use them for anyway.

MS could not deliver this concept, and it doesn't for you to buy software.

No one else has the size to pull something like this off, and the flash in the pan of netbooks shows there is a potential market there.

Good luck to them.

if google are wize

content

content

content

@Trevor Pott o_O 00:44

"...every other Linux box on the same subnet can cheerfully talk to that printer with zero configuration. I don't remotely claim to comprehend the voodoo these devices use to communicate with each other..."

The answer is closer than you think...

"I'm off to figure out what the heck kind of self configuring protocol these things are actually using..."

You could start by googling "zero configuration"

I just hope your post wasn't tongue-in-cheek or I'll look like a condescending tw@t

It seems...

As if This ChromeOS thing won't have problems with an HD that get's filled up over time, I guess that it won't happen because all is stored on the magical cloud.

I suppose too that it won't suffer malfunctions like other computer like appliances (phones) do.

It will never crash... it will never have a security breach, won't be hackable, no one will ever write a virus for it.

It won't have user profiles, so mom can read dad's affair emails easily, and dad can sniff who's dating daughter.

I guess too the magic cloud will take care of grandma screwing the bookmarks, and grandpa won't fall for the latest lottery scam.

It seems that as someone pointed it earlier there won't be any IT grief using ChromeOS.

Anything so people do not need to learn, because learning a little bit of IT (just enough) hurts, it is like learning how mortgages work, it hurts.

For god sake, can anyone give me some of that magic cloud to breathe? it seems to be good shit.

let's wait and see

Remember the first Eee 701s? The crappy Xandros that came with it? Some of us had fun souping it up and some of us eventually ditched the thing for something else.

As one poster imagined, for simple needs, it may do the job, albeit, with the end user having less control of his/her data.

I have to admit, the way Chrome OS sounds, it has little that interests me, except for how they did it, what you can learn from it (they might have a few tricks on fast boot up and shutdown for example) and what they are likely to bundle it with hardware wise.

I'd like to get my grubby paws on a cheap ARM netbook and if it means I have to get chrome OS on the side, I might just grin and bear it , much the same way I got a 701 with Xandros on it.

Outsource the hardware!

Assuming a user was on a futuristic high-end connection:

One possibility is that this could create services that run the appropriate hardware and software for you to use applications (such as high-end games) remotely.

Services like this could just update your web-application's display to show what the application/game shows remotely - clicks, etc, in the web-application could be sent back to the server for user in the remote application.

You would never again have to update your hardware or software - but subscription or usage fees would be ghastly. After all, someone would have to pay for all of that hardware.

Alternatively, someone could just write a horribly large high-end web-application and go back to the "upgrade your hardware" run-around.

Either way - more money lost, or more bandwidth lost, or both.

Has Google misread the market?

ISTR a recent article in this very Reg that stated that the Netbook was not being used in quite the way that Google seem to be implying.

Google is offering nothing here. Please move along.

So...

with no locally stored apps, and no (easily) accessible local file storage, how again is Google's Linux distro any better than the OS running a digital clock or a TI-8x calculator? Woohoo, we can see the source to a Linux distro that closes itself off when it runs. Big win there.

It's still a locked-down pile of apps with not alot of purpose.

It will be interesting to see how Google reacts when someone forks Chrome and takes their version off in a direction that Google doesn't approve of - ie lets it run local apps and have local storage.

interesting, but..

..if I can't filter ads, I am not interested, and will keep Linux on my netbook. I use Linux, MacOS and Windows, and have Firefox on all three with AdBlock. Without it, the intarpipes would be unusable with the acres of dancing, flashing jiggling "punch Sarah Palin and win an HP whitepaper on datacenter virtualisation" ads surrounding everything.

Chrome is a nice browser, but it's currently useless to me without Adblock.

People want Windows for a good reason

Thanks all you Linux/Mac tards in the thread above. But people don't just want Windows for familiarity with the OS reasons. Most people want Windows because that runs the software they either need or have learnt. Let's look at some of the apps that people want on their home PC:

1) Games. And let's be fair, virtually all of them work best on Windows. You might be able to get some running on Linux, but only if you are an uber-geek willing to go through all the pain in the world. Quite a few work on Macs these days, but not all.

2) MS Office. This is more contentious, but I have a good experience at home where I run MS Office on 2 computers and Open Office on 2 others. My girlfriend has a nightmare whenever she is using Open Office because it is so unfamiliar. Also, Open Office Calc isn't a patch on Excel. If you are a power user of spreadsheets, Excel is still the market leader - and don't forget it was Excel that originally won the office-wars for Office. Word Perfect was always the better word processor, but not by much, Excel was the better spreadsheet by a large margin.

3) Specialist Software. What happens when you want to buy PhotoShop (and there is no Linux equivalent of the same quality), or RosettaStone (no Linux version), or you want to run a CAD system that you also run at work (maybe AutoCAD, or Rhino 3D - where you can get a free version).

4) Your work VPN. A lot of companies use custom software for securing their VPN connections for when you are home working - especially big ones. Many of these are written as browser plugins that need Windows and IE, or maybe Windows and Firefox. I know some people at work who have got a flaky connection from a Mac, but it is kind of rare for these things to work on Linux.

So get a grip, there are more reasons that Windows is the dominant OS than just people's ignorance.

@AC - People Want Windows

Err, you do realize that Chrome is targeted at netbooks? Meaning your points 1 and 3 are quite possibly not applicable here (at least I can't imagine trying to play a game or run Photoshop on the shitty little screen on my netbook). Your point 2 is well taken, though. Lack of MS Office under Chrome will be as onerous an omission as it was under general Linux on the first generation netbooks. Your point 4 is perhaps true, but is changing as vendors add support for Linux to their custom VPN clients.

Most folks don't want to "run software", they want to "do things". Quite a difference.

know one will read this but...

Dont you think that google is focusing an awful lot on getting it right with hardware and security? and its a thin terminal? sounds like it could be perfect secure government work...security is the key there, the thin terminal could be used anywhere then, and google gets fat $$ to service gov. IT contracts and has our data!