Chrome OS

[Florin]

Google's enthusiastic initiatives have the common thread that Google is pervasively involved.
The software may be open-sourced, but thinking of monopoly in terms of application presence is Microsoft-era thinking.
Google as an entity is setting itself up to have its tendrils throughout the information economy, from the point of use, the point of computation, data storage, commerce, communication, and news.
Who will everyone talk to, whose channels?

What's a greater threat of vendor lock-in at this point?

I think you raise some valid concerns about Google's prominence in the information economy. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Microsoft itself is in fact probably even better positioned throughout this information economy you speak of.

Application presence is just the leverage that Microsoft has used to establish strong footholds in almost every content delivery channel thinkable. It's been a long time since Microsoft was all about selling desktop PC applications.

Between Internet Explorer, Windows Mobile, Xbox360, Live, Home Server, Enterprise Server, Hyper-V, Windows Media, Hotmail, Bing, ASP, .Net, Corbis, MSNBC, Silverlight and quite literally countless other technologies, there is hardly an area of content management, delivery and licensing where Microsoft is not either the dominant player or a strong contender.

Given the status quo versus a future threat of vendor lock-in with someone other than Microsoft, I believe the emergence of another player is not just healthy but practically a necessity.

 

[3dilettante]

Google neither needs nor cares about all of the information having to be accessed through their servers, it only needs to be able to access it via its crawler.

Independent physical machines have many more options for denying access.
A stripped-down OS hosting a browser for quick access of web applications removes some of them, and the kind of direct and seamless delivery to online servers is finely targeted to the majority of users who will not think to restrict such access.

Google's AdSense network, which most websites use to get advertising bucks, is not dependent on hosting content on Google's servers.

My point is that AdSense is dominant, and it approaches dominant with a capital D.

As an example, Google's largest initiative recently is the 'reinvention of email', which is Google Wave. Google Wave is completely federated, like SMTP. Anyone will be able to get the source of a Wave server, host their own accounts, and even host private conversations between two servers without Google being in the loop.

Let's just hope one person in that loop isn't a noob running a ChromeOS notebook and accessing it with a Google App.

Also, they are able to pick up information about you through AdSense or Analytics, although in practice, Google's AdSense targeting is not behavior (based on tracking you) driven, but based on content.

That's how it is now. The incumbency can allow for future alterations.

Well, as I pointed out, many of Google's initiatives do not mandate Google be involved. Anyone can download Android and remove all of the Google Apps integrations. Anyone can build their own version of Chrome that does not send a single packet of data to Google's network.

Anyone can, but the dominant distributor will most likely be Google, and the preponderance of users will not.

Google offers the tools of online advertising commerce (if it doesn't just stiff them), it offers email, it wants to offer on-line health records.
The content of people's lives is what Google is indexing, and it has greater say in what they see or earn online.

Google's tendrils via it's open source and open specification initiatives can only be maintained with public participation. It's all too trivial to remove them.

In isolation, each individual initiative may be trivial to excise, though the bulk of the populace would not bother.
The ecosystem Google wants to establish and place itself as the first encumbent can make things less easy.

In fact, Google's whole FCC Auction gambit was designed to ensure that people could install whatever they want on phones without being firmware locked, which actually undermines the ability for Google to control Android forks on devices.

Google's entry into the spectrum debate was an outsider to established players.
The test of its altruism will come when it finds itself on the other side.

Let me just preface this with the fact that I have family members working for Google and I am privy to lots of internal discussions, as well as knowing lots of managers at Google due to prior working relationships. Googlers are practically indoctrinated from the point of hiring with "do no evil" culture run by a Department of Corporate Culture, that originates from the top down.

I am not entirely comforted by this.

It's all well and fine for you to speculate in the absence of information about internal corporate dialog, but as ridiculous as it sounds, Google is run internally in a very academic and idealistic way and until the recent economic crash, there wasn't even much talk of even finding ways to monetize most Google products. Employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their time on side projects.

Internal dialog is nice and non-binding.
Nobody can hold you to things you mutter to yourself.

The company from my knowledge is not via traditional MBA-learned management techniques, but is more or less, a unique Silicon Valley creation.

Neither was certain company based in Redmond, at least not at first.

When you see Googler's pushing for these projects, think not about corporate planning at the top, but rather, idealistic young Stanford graduate employees who are religious about openness and bent on trying to change the world.

I love the road of good intentions they've paved.
Google by its very size and reach warrants some level of mistrust, no matter how internally pure its members are or believe themselves to be.
It does not take much to take the levers they wish to move the world with and apply them in a less idealistic direction.
As you've said, economic conditions have already forced some of that.

(and in case you think this is naivete, every Friday, Google has a company wide video conference/town hall, in which any employee can directly ask Sergey or Larry questions, and you will find quite a number of contentious employees worried about evilness forced by recent economic conditions, by an overemphasis on trying to monetize users too much)

Let's hope the dear leaders live forever, then.
It's all nice internal, non-binding deliberation, and apparently a lot of worried employees.

To paraphrase Yoda:
Circumstances lead to Monetization, Monetization leads to Rationalization, Rationalization leads to ...

 

[willardjuice]

You don't write apps for Chrome OS. You write them for the web. And they run identically on mac, mob, win, and lin.

Ugh you knew what I meant, stop being a nitpicking bitch.

People are already writing applications for HTML/Javascript and HTML5

Yeah I'm sure there are tons of people who are writing applications for an unfinished standard. And Javascript has yet to rule the world; I don't foresee that changing.

There are only two things I do

I don't care what you do/use. The general populous != you. At my job teachers/students use many applications that aren't "web based". Most of them have no "Google equivalent". What's your answer for that? You also still haven't answered my question on why you would use this over another linux distro (other than it may boot up faster which is hardly a selling point considering its limitations).

 

[DemoCoder]

The point you're missing 3d, is that while Google does have tendrils, they have less information about you then Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Facebook, Visa, and a whole host of other organizations that violate your privacy in potentially far more threatening ways.

Lest you forget, Microsoft still controls like 95% of the world's desktops, 60-70% of the browser market, almost all of the corporate desktop and application market, a huge swath of the console market, a chunk of the mobile market, a chunk of the embedded market, and on and on.

In some countries, like Korea, IE usage is mandated (a supreme court case struck down a complaint by a man that all banks and government sites require IE) and anonymity banned. Microsoft's revenues still dwarf Google, and they exercise far more control over the entire computer industry (together with Intel).

Your argument boils down to a bunch of handwaving: "Google is big, they operate for profit, and they have a large share of online advertising and search, therefore they have the potential to do evil if they want." My argument is, here, today, other companies have equally outsized market power and have already committed evil. If you want to bust up and regulate, maybe you should look at who is doing what.

Yes, Google's benevolence depends on their management and employees holding to their principles and it is possible in the future they won't be so benevolent. Fine.

But I'm talking about the reasons that Chrome OS exists today, not as a project invented in the future by evil managers, but why does it exist today? And the reason it exists today has nothing to do with the motives you have imputed.

 

[DemoCoder]

Yeah I'm sure there are tons of people who are writing applications for an unfinished standard. And Javascript has yet to rule the world; I don't foresee that changing.

People are writing applications for HTML5 today, because the way Javascript developers work is through capability detection and fallback. HTML5 is a description of how current implementations work today, it is not a plan for how things should work in the future, that's the whole point of the WHATWG vs the W3C. The W3C would create specs detailing future capability, WHATWG documents implementations. That's what Safari4, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, and Opera already implement 99% of HTML5, even IE8 implements some of it. In fact, the <canvas> element has existed since Firefox 2 and Safari 2.

JS developers use libraries like Dojo, jQuery, MooTools, etc to smooth over implementations. For example, local database storage is handed via detection: If HTML5, use it, else if Google Gears installed, use it, else if Flash exists, use it.

I don't care what you do/use. The general populous != you. At my job teachers/students use many applications that aren't "web based". Most of them have no "Google equivalent". What's your answer for that? You also still haven't answered my question on why you would use this over another linux distro (other than it may boot up faster which is hardly a selling point considering its limitations).

Well, I don't use Linux other for hosting, I use OSX. The Linux desktop is a steaming pile of shit, so one reason I might want to use it in a NetBook is less bloat and better UI. I wouldn't exactly be wanting to run large compiles or video editing on a NetBook anyway, that's not the point of those devices.

And why do you keep talking about Google equivalent? Web Apps != Google. People use the web for email, photo editing/hosting, social networking, collaborative document editing, diagramming, charting, spreadsheets, and tons of other apps that are not centrally owned by Google.

I am not exactly the general populace, I'm a hard core user. The general populace is your Mom and your baby tween sister.

 

[willardjuice]

People are writing applications for HTML5 today, because the way Javascript developers work is through capability detection and fallback. HTML5 is a description of how current implementations work today, it is not a plan for how things should work in the future, that's the whole point of the WHATWG vs the W3C. The W3C would create specs detailing future capability, WHATWG documents implementations. That's what Safari4, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, and Opera already implement 99% of HTML5, even IE8 implements some of it. In fact, the <canvas> element has existed since Firefox 2 and Safari 2.

That's not telling the whole story. If I were to write a "youtube" application what video codec should I use? Currently HTML5 doesn't specify which one to use. And not all the browsers support the same one. An unfinished standard is an unfinished standard whether you choose to acknowledge or not. This is pretty important to some programmers.

If HTML5, use it, else if Google Gears installed, use it, else if Flash exists, use it.

That sounds super efficient. I would love to be part of that debugging team...

Well, I don't use Linux other for hosting, I use OSX. The Linux desktop is a steaming pile of shit, so one reason I might want to use it in a NetBook is less bloat and better UI.

You don't even know what the UI of Chome OS will look like! I also don't think gnome/kde look like "shit". It's fairly easy to customize them.

And why do you keep talking about Google equivalent?

Because you keep telling us about all these glorious projects/web applications Google is supporting (hence why I used quotes, replace "google equivalent" with web applications if you must).

I am not exactly the general populace, I'm a hard core user. The general populace is your Mom and your baby tween sister.

Yeah which was my point...

 

[DemoCoder]

That's not telling the whole story. If I were to write a "youtube" application what video codec should I use? Currently HTML5 doesn't specify which one to use. And not all the browsers support the same one. An unfinished standard is an unfinished standard whether you choose to acknowledge or not. This is pretty important to some programmers.

Doesn't change jack. Since Flash supports H.263 and H.264, most people will host Theora and H.264 and pick whichever is supported via a capability check. This is exactly what happens today with Flash already, and it will be exactly what happens with the <video> tag. There will be a fallback for <video> like there already is with <audio> (SoundManager) by using Flash.

That sounds super efficient. I would love to be part of that debugging team...

It's perfectly efficient when using GWT. And Dojo and jQuery are relatively rock solid. Even Microsoft ships jQuery now.

You don't even know what the UI of Chome OS will look like! I also don't think gnome/kde look like "shit". It's fairly easy to customize them.

Yeah, because I love spending all my time fixing bad UI design by fscking around with window managers.

Because you keep telling us about all these glorious projects/web applications Google is supporting (hence why I used quotes, replace "google equivalent" with web applications if you must).

I'm talking about browser based applications in general, which have already replaced many of people's daily desktop applications. The irony of someone using a web-based forum software, instead of a desktop forum reader (like RN/TRN) arguing against this trend is amusing.

Whether you realize it or not, people are spending more and more time in web browsers these days, and less and less time in offline desktop apps. The economics of developing, deploying, maintaining, and supporting web based applications are also far superior.

Yes, I am not the average user, that's because I run an IDE for work. There are 10x as many people who do not need to run anything so sophisticated.

As an example, the entire Stanford/Sutter Health medical system in the Bay Area (previously a native app/VB app using Citrix WinFrame) has been replaced by a web based system. Doctors and Patients use it for everything. The old Citrix WinFrame based terminal system went bye-bye.

I have a friend who works in the legal industry, and apparently there is a revolution sweeping law firms, throwing out Word Perfect/MS Word as mail-merge / form / document management solutions, and going to online web-based systems.

Even Mathematica is now web-based. And I could see PSPICE, LaTeX, MATLAB, and others moving as well.

Video editing, rendering, 3D, and games are pretty much what I see as the core desktop strengths these days.

 

[3dilettante]

The point you're missing 3d, is that while Google does have tendrils, they have less information about you then Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Facebook, Visa, and a whole host of other organizations that violate your privacy in potentially far more threatening ways.

Relative levels of evil is not a point you've made thus far, rather that Google's Great Peoples Spirit #1 will keep us all safe from harm.

I don't trust those entities, either.
I haven't excused Microsoft or Blockbuster (the latter may not be long with us, but still), and Microsoft may get things like Midori up an running that I would mistrust as much as a Google app.

The premise you've posited, is that Google's efforts are a disruptive opportunity that threatens the established players, and that one company is dynamic, effective, awash in cash, and on the ascent, while one is on the decline.
If relative size and revenues are a measure of the potential for evil, it would follow one supposedly non-evil corporation's potential is similarly rising.

I reserved my comments for the company in question that is currently on the ascent, awash in cash, and effectively leveraging new sources of influence the old players flounder with.

Lest you forget, Microsoft still controls like 95% of the world's desktops, 60-70% of the browser market, almost all of the corporate desktop and application market, a huge swath of the console market, a chunk of the mobile market, a chunk of the embedded market, and on and on.

I've prefaced my arguments with the possibility of this being undone or reversed.
The great future you've posited relies on this implicitly.

Your argument boils down to a bunch of handwaving: "Google is big, they operate for profit, and they have a large share of online advertising and search, therefore they have the potential to do evil if they want." My argument is, here, today, other companies have equally outsized market power and have already committed evil. If you want to bust up and regulate, maybe you should look at who is doing what.

The argument I saw was that Google's cultish indoctrinations and internal non-binding debate is sufficient to give it a pass.

This isn't the thread about Mastercard's likely passing my purchasing habits to other parties or using it to determine my credit rating.

But I'm talking about the reasons that Chrome OS exists today, not as a project invented in the future by evil managers, but why does it exist today? And the reason it exists today has nothing to do with the motives you have imputed.

My argument does not depend on Chrome OS being an evil plot, just that if it has success, it will aggregate additional power under one roof.

My secondary point is that Google's public positions do not match what you say it muses privately, and that indicates at the very least a certain amount of legal department disingenuousness, or a flaw in the form of a lack of self-awareness and a lack of respect for history.

Greek tragedies only need one flaw in their hero.

 

[DemoCoder]

My argument does not depend on Chrome OS being an evil plot, just that if it has success, it will aggregate additional power under one roof.

And my point is, it doesn't anymore than increased web usage does. Even if Chrome OS didn't exist (and it doesn't yet), more and more applications moving online undermines Microsoft, and helps players who majority revenue derives from online usage.

But Chrome OS specifically doesn't aggregate power, in the sense that Google won't control it, anymore than Google controls Python, even though it employs Guido (it's inventor) and pays for its upkeep. Chrome is open source, the majority of it is derived from WebKit, which started as an Apple project, which came from KHTML, an open source HTML component from the KDE project, itself originating from a commercial company which makes the libQt library.

Chrome is WebKit + V8 + process isolation + plus (literally) UI Chrome embellishments! That is, it is like taking the Safari web browser, and replacing the Javascript engine DLL with V8, and then tweaking the UI.

Chrome OS would simply be Chrome, plus a few Javascript libraries tacked on and a window manager. It simply won't be capable of being owned and controlled by Google unless Google tries to release it under a weird license that somehow packages opensource Chromium with non-opensource Javascript libraries (which are text files)

This thread is about Chrome OS. And my point being, whatever hysterical fears you have about some future Google behemoth, Chrome OS is simply irrelevent to them.

 

[Florin]

My argument does not depend on Chrome OS being an evil plot, just that if it has success, it will aggregate additional power under one roof.

I consider this to be a good thing at this point in time. The balance of power right now is so completely off that any reshifting is improvement.

The fact that this emerging contender has this as a mission statement is just an added bonus, nothing else.

 

[Ike Turner]

Funny to see the linux crowed pissed at Google for once :
Google's Linux fork may not trouble Microsoft :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10282182-16.html?tag=newsCategoryArea.0

Well, because Google clearly wants to pull a Microsoft. Yes, Google has stated that "[a]ll web-based applications will automatically work," and not just on Chrome OS, as doing otherwise would be suicide, but you can bet that Google will fine-tune its own applications to privilege their performance on its OS...just as Microsoft has. At least Microsoft doesn't ask the open-source community to help it in such work.

Five Reasons Google Chrome OS Will Fail : http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2009/070809-five-reasons-google-chrome-os.html

No thanks Google, we've got Ubuntu : http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/sof...we-ve-got-Ubuntu/0,139023769,339297306,00.htm

Google ChromeOS: Have people taken leave of their senses? : http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1065

 

[DemoCoder]

Hehe, some of those comments seem to have sent their authors into a head spin.

This all reminds me of how Dvorak proclaimed that the iPhone will utterly fail and gave lots of splendid reasons.

Android was supposed to fail, and it is a Linux fork as well, and guess what, the Android handset alliance is racking up deals now. The Palm Pre is essentially Chrome OS for phones. It's a Linux fork plus WebKit fork. It never ceases to amaze me how people go off the deep end over something some simple.

No one in their right mind will think that this will threaten Ubuntu in any way except for linux zealots. Anyway, Ubuntu deserves some competition anyway. I waited 20 years for someone to produce a nice Unix desktop, and it wasn't until the NeXT and OSX that I got one. I've been using Unix since the mid 80s and pretty much all of the attempted desktops were amateurish and designed for hackers, not for ordinary users.

Even something as simple as installing fonts and changing screen resolution was a major chore in Linux until just a few years ago.

 

[V3]

Forcing Chrome with their OS is no different to what MS is doing. Worst is doing it with open source. They need to seperate Chrome and the OS, or at least have distro where you can choose your own browsers and your own search engines.

But since we're lacking competition in this sector, this is not too bad.

 

[DemoCoder]

Forcing Chrome with their OS is no different to what MS is doing. Worst is doing it with open source. They need to seperate Chrome and the OS, or at least have distro where you can choose your own browsers and your own search engines.

But since we're lacking competition in this sector, this is not too bad.

It may or may not be practical to do this. Currently, browsers don't get access to a file system or the 'desktop', so they'll either have to do everything as a plugin for the other browsers, or drop those features from the OS which interactive natively with the windowing system and file system.

There is precedent I guess for this, as Google Desktop provides this kind of functionality already.

 

[willardjuice]

Doesn't change jack. Since Flash supports H.263 and H.264

Ah but that's flash! It's an add-on and not open sourced (it's controlled by a separate party). You're telling me I should rely on add-ons for my program?

It's perfectly efficient when using GWT. And Dojo and jQuery are relatively rock solid. Even Microsoft ships jQuery now.

Is it efficient on all platforms? The problem here is now my code is dependent on things like Dojo and what browser my user is using. What if there are bugs in Dojo? What then?

Yeah, because I love spending all my time fixing bad UI design by fscking around with window managers.

Yeah it's really hard and time consuming...

The irony of someone using a web-based forum software, instead of a desktop forum reader (like RN/TRN) arguing against this trend is amusing

This is just dumb and your whole point is dumb. Should we have a contest where I name all the desktop applications I use and you name off all the web applications you use? Like it or not majority of the people still rely on desktop applications.

The Palm Pre is essentially Chrome OS for phones.

I lol'd.

 

[DemoCoder]

Ah but that's flash! It's an add-on and not open sourced (it's controlled by a separate party). You're telling me I should rely on add-ons for my program?

Everyone does. Flash has 99% market penetration. Flash is the ultimate fallback. What do you think YouTube, Hulu, use? The reason why is, Adobe already paid the H.264 license. Browsers can't statically link against H.264 and distribute for free unless the Mozilla organization, for example, wants to cough up $$$$ which they don't.

Is it efficient on all platforms? The problem here is now my code is dependent on things like Dojo and what browser my user is using. What if there are bugs in Dojo? What then?

First off, GWT compiles different versions for different platforms, so that code that targets say, IE6 is not included in say, the Safari version. So yes, it is absolutely efficient in size/space (as efficient as you can make it) by virtue of its Deferred Binding mechanism.

Secondly, so what if Dojo has bugs? This is a silly argument. Windows has bugs. Linux has bugs. Drivers have bugs. Browsers have bugs, and desktop applications have bugs.

The point is, that the browsers have significantly MORE bugs, and if you'd ever written a browser app and tried to make it work on IE, Firefox, and Safari, you'd know, that JS abstraction libraries solve major headaches.

It is no different than trying to code a 3D game and discovering different video card drivers have different bugs, and wouldn't it be nice if there was a middleware that took care of those details for you.

This is just dumb and your whole point is dumb. Should we have a contest where I name all the desktop applications I use and you name off all the web applications you use? Like it or not majority of the people still rely on desktop applications.

yes, the browser being the #1 desktop application.

Look, on monday, (rumors) Microsoft is announcing that Office is moving to the Web and will showcase their online version of Word/Excel/etc. If that ain't a harbinger of what's coming, I don't know what is, since rewriting Office in Javascript isn't exactly a cheap exercise to be done for the sake of it. (theoretically it could be done in Silverlight, we'll see)

I lol'd.

Because you don't understand that the Pre is the first mobile phone operating system in which the only programming model is one based on writing web applications, and that the Pre is using an optimized version of WebKit (the rendering engine in Chrome) to pull this off?

 

[willardjuice]

What do you think YouTube, Hulu, use?

By choice though? I doubt it's for convenience.

Windows has bugs. Linux has bugs. Drivers have bugs. Browsers have bugs, and desktop applications have bugs.

But where do those bugs come from? Usually from the programmers themselves. Bugs caused from compilers (even with good code) don't occur that often. Why should I have to rely on dojo just to write a program?

wouldn't it be nice if there was a middleware that took care of those details for you

No. The same reason people prefer C/C++ over Java/C#.

yes, the browser being the #1 desktop application.

Thanks for more irrelevant banter.

Look, on monday, (rumors) Microsoft is announcing that Office is moving to the Web and will showcase their online version of Word/Excel/etc. If that ain't a harbinger of what's coming, I don't know what is, since rewriting Office in Javascript isn't exactly a cheap exercise to be done for the sake of it. (theoretically it could be done in Silverlight, we'll see)

That is completely untrue. Office Web != Office 2010. Nice try though.

Because you don't understand that the Pre is the first mobile phone operating system in which the only programming model is one based on writing web applications, and that the Pre is using an optimized version of WebKit (the rendering engine in Chrome) to pull this off?

Because it's a phone. What kind of applications do you expect to run on a (comparatively) low powered ARM processor?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Chrome OS seems redundant. Want a stripped down OS and don't run applications on it? use Android. Want a full desktop? use a gnu/linux distro.
Google doesn't give any technical detail (I imagine it would use either android or gnu, because I don't see a reason for yet another platform). So the announcement leaves me uninterested.

 

[DemoCoder]

But where do those bugs come from? Usually from the programmers themselves. Bugs caused from compilers (even with good code) don't occur that often. Why should I have to rely on dojo just to write a program?

You don't have to, it's a library you dolt, no different than MFC, ATL, and any other junk you have on windows. You have the choice of using library functions, or coding directly. Your commentary is quite silly, asserting that developers don't want to use libraries. You're beloved KDE and GNOME are perfect examples of this. LibQt in particular, the foundation of KDE, was a multi-OS windowing kit.

No. The same reason people prefer C/C++ over Java/C#.

Non-sequitur. It's got nothing to do with languages. The games industry is full of middleware and abstraction, because not everyone wants to rewrite everything by hand. That is, if you want to be productive

That is completely untrue. Office Web != Office 2010. Nice try though.

The fact that Microsoft is bothering at all to do an online version of their apps, even if they continue to sell desktop versions in parallel, implies they have a substantial fear that online cloud based applications could capture significant market share.

Because it's a phone. What kind of applications do you expect to run on a (comparatively) low powered ARM processor?

Funny, it's more powerful than a typical PC running MS applications in recent history. I guess no one was able to run productivity apps back when people had less than 4gb of memory and Pentium3's.

But that's the point. Apps and OSes have massively bloated over the last 20 years, but actual user functionality hasn't grown as much. You're not substantially more productive with MS Word in 2009 than you were in 1988. Stripping down a Linux distro to be lean-and-mean to run on low-end hardware is just what the doctor ordered.

 

[slider]

I wonder what Larry Ellison feels about this all. Anyone remember the Network PC initiative? I believe they entered a strategic alliance with ARM/Acorn. Ahh, simpler times.