The tech sphere exploded yesterday when Google announced they’d be releasing Chrome OS, or Google’s version of an operating system. They pulled their services out of beta and said they’d be reinventing the way people viewed an operating system and sort of even claimed that it would be the swan song for viruses. People touted it as the end of Microsoft and a giant step towards computing in the cloud.
Along the fringes of the discussion though were several more logical and level-headed thoughts on the reasoning, timing and what it actually would mean for people with computers. My favorite article on this was from the Register: Google’s Vanity OS is Microsoft’s Dream. This article speaks of this announcement as creating a phony sense of competition in the operating system realm which Microsoft could use to save tons of money and get around dealing with it’s antitrust issues.
More fun though is deeper in the article where it speaks of the different ways that people use their computers and how the cloud and it’s applications aren’t robust enough to do a lot of things that we need it to do.
The idea of a desktop running a thin OS served by the cloud is fine – until you want to do image processing, or make music or videos. You do realize there’s more to a PC than updating your Facebook profile, right?
The extent of image processing in the cloud begins and ends with ICanHazCheeseburger. You really can’t fault its ability to move the funny caption around – and change its colour! Get back to me when there’s real-time video scrubbing, rendering or multiple levels of Undo.
Hear! Hear! Though I’m on the internet more than most, there are tons of tools and programs and games that I need to do my job and live my life which aren’t yet available on Twitter.
Shortly after reading a variety of articles and fanfare around this announcement I found a couple of videos on YouTube that I thought were hilarious (mostly cause I’m a dork) but actually ended up making me think about some things in conjunction with a Google operating system. Let’s look at it like this: currently you only (or should only, depending on how dumb or trusting you are) put stuff up on the net that you are comfortable with others finding or knowing about. You might only upload certain pictures to Flickr or show certain personal statistics about yourself on Facebook. But chances are that you have more private information on your local computer. Some of these are probably sensitive in nature – credit cards, billing information, those drunk pictures of you at that one party, financial information about your business, or *gasp* some grainy night vision action of you and that one chick engaged in some NSFW activities.
How do feel about putting that up on the cloud?
There are lots of privacy issues inherant in every 3rd party platform but I’m not sure that any of us grasps what that will mean for your most private info and the new Google Chrome OS. You’ll probably just have to agree to some Terms & Conditions and then pray that you don’t rub ‘em the wrong way and loose it all.
Google as Your Roommate – Part 1
Google as Your Roommate – Part 2
