I’ve just been looking at some of the coverage of Google’s ChromeOS, and it leaves me slightly bewildered.
The first thing that I looked at was a video demo by the Chrome project manager. In it, he stresses is that “all your data is in the cloud”. Does that mean that your ChromeOS netbook will be essentially unusable if you don’t have a net connection? If so, that’s a dealbreaker right there. Internet access is by no means as ubiquitous as Google might like to pretend, even within the United States. You could pay for an EVDO card, of course, but with plans starting at $40/month, the price of your handy-dandy netbook just doubled. Moreover, as anyone who owns a mobile phone knows, even paying $40/month doesn’t guarantee you a signal. How happy would you be with your present computer if the hard disk was simply inaccessible from time to time?
If using ChromeOS means that from time to time your netbook will become a lightweight, highly-portable brick, they aren’t going to have a lot of takers.
While I’m nitpicking, let’s take a shot at the aesthetics. ChromeOS looks like the Chrome browser, which is to say it looks like ass. I actually used the Chrome browser for a while as my main browser but I never loved the way it looked. They’ve gone in for the kind of pointless reinvented look-and-feel that you get when people who don’t normally write software have to roll their own. If you’ve ever used the bundled software that ships with a piece of hardware - a hard drive, for example, or a digital camera - you’ll know what I mean. Google has time to fix that, of course, but I wonder if they will.
A more serious objection has to do with the fact that the UI is essentially modeled on a web browser (for the very good reason that that’s what it is). Unfortunately, anyone who has tried to use a web browser to do real work for any length of time will have noticed that as user experiences go, it’s definitely second-rate. There’s a reason why modern GUI’s don’t look and behave like web browsers. Extending the web browser metaphor to the entire UI is a recipe for suck.
One thing that did intrigue me was a throwaway remark in the ChromeOS GUI concept video. The developer says that “when you log in to any ChromeOS device, you resume your previous session”. What’s not clear from the demo is whether the session is stored in the cloud, or on the local device. If it’s the former - and it might as well be, given that the whole OS has a cloud-dependency built-in - that could go some way to reconciling me to the cloud-centric nature of the OS. The idea of having a ‘virtual workspace’ that you can access from any machine actually has some appeal. (When I worked at Sony, I did some proof-of-concept work on an agent-based virtual desktop as a kind of personal skunkworks project: I still think it’s an idea whose time might yet come). I travel from time to time; I like the idea that I could sit down in a cybercafe, log in and have my private environment instantly there, just the way I left it. Currently, of course, that’s not such a great idea. Developing-world cybercafes all run Windows, which means that their machines tend to be a soup of viruses and spyware. Ten seconds after you logged in, the keyloggers would own your workspace. But one of the pitch points for ChromeOS is supposedly security. If Google could deliver on that, a ChromeOS-equipped cybercafe might actually be a place where you wouldn’t fear to log in.
One final cause for concern is that Google’s ChromeOS may be aimed at tying you ever more closely to the mothership: your ‘applications’ are, of course, GMail, and Google Docs, and whatever else Google comes up with between now and then. That’s an approach that has never made me comfortable, and not just for the reasons hinted at in this cartoon. I don’t like the increasing trend towards engineered-in dependencies on a particular corporation (Apple, I’m looking at you too). I want a computer to be a tool that I use, not a way for a large company to sneak a mini-mall into my home.
There’s an opportunity here for open-source. If ChromeOS does prove to be tied uncomfortably closely to Google, how hard would it be to build a similar lightweight web-OS based on a Linux kernel and WebKit? Make it truly open, so that the user would have free choice of which web applications they use. Some users would want to use it with open-source web-apps running on their own server, just to make sure that they really own their own data. Others might be satisfied with something run on a third-party service or even on Google. It doesn’t matter. But if we have to have web-based OS’s, let’s make them open the same way that the web is open, rather than having them tied to a single huge and increasingly pervasive provider.
