Makes one think... If fifteen years ago someone thought that dialup makes everything that's not online obsolete, they were of course gravely wrong. What does this say about Chrome OS? Will we sitting in 2025, smirking about the naivete that made some think that in 2010 nothing but the web is required?
There are several trademarks for "nothing but net". I didn't find any for "nothing but web" but there may be some in process applications that I can't see.
I think they may have messed up a bit on the pilot application; I applied using the long form, but it forced me into choosing a State (list of 50 USA states) even though I selected my country to Canada. I understand that they only want US residents right now (Verizon-tied), but as a web form it doesn't make any sense.
I think Google is far more ambitious in the business space than most people realize. They are aiming directly at Microsoft's empire. Consider the amazing TCO for a business that deploys only Google Apps and ChromeOS notebooks to its employees. Obviously, Google Apps are not quite good enough yet, but Google knows this is a long term project. The apps are constantly improving and at the same time people are steadily migrating to the web for many of their workflows anyway. At some point it'll get really hard to justify spending $1-2k up front plus IT overheads per employee when you could get it for virtually nothing with a ChromeOS notebook.
I really want to try one of these, but I can't lie to Google. I don't use the Web for anything. I listen to music with xmms2 on the command-line. I write in Emacs. I read my email in Emacs. I download TV shows from Usenet.
I realized that Emacs is the Chrome OS, except with 25 years of libraries and applications to show for it.
I use the web for visiting websites, but that's only a very small part of my day. Most everything I do for fun or socialization or for creative purposes I do without the web. I may publish my stuff to the web, but it's a medium, not a tool. A painter wouldn't say he spends a lot of time working with magazines, even if most people know his paintings from one.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing the idea of Chrome OS. Like I said, Chrome is basically a pretty Emacs, which is a great environment. But it won't work for me today.
(Would I buy a Chrome OS tablet, just for reading random crap on the web? You bet! But I wouldn't commit to using one as my primary computer, because I wouldn't be able to do anything I want to do.)
Why do you assume Google only wants testers who already use the web for every application? They may seek feedback on the transition process, which many potential customers face. That is, unless this is targeted squarely at children.
That was a great idea to put a "search" key in place of a caps lock key. I search all the time, and haven't (intentionally) used caps lock once my entire life.
Emacs won't run? Then why would I want to use it? What about all my Lisp code?
And why on earth do I want to give Google so much control of my OS? And full control of my laptop? Maybe I should just give bots from outer space full control of my workspace.
You can share opinions on HN. It is my opinion that ChromeOS is more than a little likely to fail. There is too much the web can't replace. And the Chrome web app store? Meh. I hope it fails. I'd love to start paying $4 for all those crappy flash/javascript games. "Installing" web pages? Who came up with this nonsense?
See. I just shared some opinions. Feel free to share your own.
Our opinions also amount to reviews. This is a new product, and we're speculating about how we would review it had we tried it.
But I use both fingers for the letters in NASA so I would normally have to hold 2 different shift keys. Are you saying you hold just one shift and type the rest of the letters with your other hand
Hold left shift with left pinky. Type n-a-s-a with both hands. I honestly have no idea how else you would do it. Hitting caps lock seems like such a waste of time.
I hold the left shift key and type NASA with the rest of my fingers. Just because a finger is tied up holding down a key doesn't mean the rest of the fingers cannot also be used. :)
I have no idea whats the big deal about Chrome OS. Didn't a lot of OEM's already have this kind of functionality?
Atleast my 1.5 yr old Sony VAIO has a Web button, which boots the system to slightly stripped down version of Firefox without booting OS. Its also very fast, boots in 10-20 seconds and runs flash content too.
There is business strategy involved as well. Google wants to reduce its dependency on Apple and Microsoft. Unless you were a GNU+Linux/BSD enthusiast, you were accessing their products from a laptop running the software of one their competitors. Similarly, this is one of the reasons for Android. They could have just made apps for the iPhone, Windows phone, RIM, etc, but they made apps for the iPhone and Android to help reduce the dependency and give themselves more freedom
I share your confusion. If all I want to run is a browser, I can easily achieve that today. The only point in its favor I can see is that it removes "attractive nuisances" for users that only use email and a browser, but I don't see anything it offers to geeks or even moderately knowledgable users.
Every major OS out there caters to people who don't run the browser 100%. I don't need Evolution, Gedit, Rhythmbox, Gwitter, Empathy, or any other app that gets shoved on my Ubuntu whenever I install and downlaod the netbook version. And that's the open source operating system!
I run Windows 7 Ultimate on a $219 Aspire One that I added a decent 60GB SSD to ($100) and an extra 9 cell battery $59. Between both batteries, I have enough charge to last my from Barcelona to San Francisco with a 4 hour layover at JFK. And, I have a full web experience, any files I need are perfectly synced without any hassle via Dropbox. And, I can use most any desktop software I like.
3G service from most any carrier that I've tried is barely adequate for surfing the web on my Android cell phone. I would hate to have to rely on 3G service for all external storage for my computer.
I don't see how eliminating local storage on my computer and putting all my data on Google's servers is better than having access to that data locally. Random access to an SSD is 10^(3-4) ns, a random seek on disks with spindles is 10^(6-7)ns and a packet sent round trip across the country is 10^(8-9)ns.
I can buy a 16GB flash drive at Frys for $15. When local storage is so ubiquitous and cheap, I don't understand why would you want to develop an OS that relied on packet transfer for permanent storage rather than local storage with delayed synchronization.
It's not like having local permanent storage is much of a hindrance. I've never said, "Damn, if I could only get rid of 60GB of local storage on my computer, every thing would be great". I do find myself cursing my lack of network coverage on a regular basis, however.
I suppose that it makes sense if you are Google and you want as much of people's data on your servers so you can money by mining that data. Aside from that, I just don't get it.
My experience is that "legacy" refers to "any software that we want to put down or don't want to support 100% any more", so I guess Google decided all native software was legacy the minute they announced Chrome OS.
I've seen the same thing happen with code internally - a developer writes an untested replacement for a component and then instantly declares the old version "legacy", even though it still works fine.
I'm a little uncomfortable about the wording of this sentence too. Perhaps if they were called traditional desktop apps, I would've been happier.
I still like to run a lot more desktop apps and some things are just not there as a webapp, or certainly not as tweakable. But I can give Google that much, I'm perhaps not their target audience. Which is also fine by me. What I'm worried about is the mom-pop people who will use it in the appropriate fashion, will have young kids also using them. I don't want to sound like the old guard here and I'm happy to see Google making real progress in making computing for everyone, but there is something about running my first Basic program on my parent's computer or accidentally fdisk'ing the whole thing, that I hope the nextgen of geeks don't get to miss out on. With wording such as 'legacy software', I just hope they somehow come to tinker with the OS too rather than just seeing better webapps.
Probably when SysAdmins did too, as I believe the ChromeOS program manager was quoted along those lines the other day. The wording was closer to pink slipping them completely, but I'm going off the top of my head here.
I think the pilot program is about right for something as bold as how they're marketing this. Putting as many of these in the hands of the very people they're pissing at and saying "ok, you tell us then" is the only way to change some minds. If they don't ship 100,000 of these to smart people, I can't see it taking off.
The marketing is horrendous otherwise. A new sort of web based platform? I get that, I'm ok with that. A new sort of product that has marketing materials telling me my opinions are bullhookey and a PM that wants to see me out of a job is another.
I think that is precisely their mindset. For 99% users, once you move office-suite applications to the cloud, 99% of their computer use is on websites. Therefore, the operating system and "legacy" PC software should fade from view.
What a poor survey. These notes are about the Developer version.
The final question is, "If selected, will you use this Chrome notebook as your primary computer and provide regular feedback?" This should have been the first question so people didn't have to waste their time filling out the survey if they won't use the machine as their #1 machine.
How many developers would use a Chrome OS netbook as their primary computer? A secondary computer (think tablet) sure, but for doing their day-to-day coding?
I've used a tiny Viao (pre-netbook era) as a main (home) development machine, but that had a full Linux OS and was unusual.
Other issues:
- Have to provide a US state even for people outside of the US
- Item labeled "Primary Email" with a note, "If you have a Gmail address, please supply that."
- Can only answer once to, "Which OS do you use most of the time?" (How about people who use two OSes equally?)
- Similar problem for, "Which web browser do you use most of the time?". (Different browsers on different computers? Using multiple main browers at the same time?)
- "What type of device do you use most frequently?" Again, only one answer. (I use laptop, desktop and ipad extensively)
- "How do you check your email most often?" single option. (How about people who, you know, check both work and personal email?)
- "Which apps or tools do you use at least once a week?". It names specific applications. Hard to tell if "Adobe Reader" is meant as a proxy for "PDF Viewer" or not.
- "How do you connect to the Internet most often?" only a single answer...
- (snip: other questions with only single answers that should allow multiple)
That's the part that confuses me. Computers are traditionally more powerful and flexible than SmartPhones / tablets but a computer running ChromeOS is actually more limited than an iOS or Android device at this point.
Most computer users are not powerusers and they don't need a powerful PC or OS. Current operating systems are over complicated for casual users and limitations work as an advantage for people like my parents. They shouldn't need to understand what a file system is, everything should just work in the background.
Then think about it in terms of form factor and input devices: computers have physical keyboards and indirect relative pointing devices. Tablets and smartphones are touch-based, with (so far) no haptic feedback and lower precision of pointing, but the advantages of direct pointing.
So is there any concept of "files" and/or "folders" on the hard drive of these computers? If so, is there a file explorer app to manage them? Or is it black-boxed, like an iP(hone|ad|od)?
Chrome OS is just another step in the division of labor. Instead of managing our data ourselves, it pushes us even further than most other products so far to let others take care of it for us. It'll be there when we want it, and probably better organized, too.
And, for a lot of people, security is a concern, but in the background. A fly buzzing by the screen door, but not something that would keep them from taking an easy option from a company that 'knows the answer to everything'.
Anyone know why they switched the shortcut for "view shortcuts" from the Gmail/ Google Reader "?" button (shift+/) to "Ctrl+Alt+/"? Seems strange to me, as "?" makes intuitive sense and adding a modifier key (like ctrl) would be sufficient to distinguish between shortcuts in Gmail and those in the OS.
My guess is that they'll use it to gather demographics of people interested in the device. There was a ton of information to fill in that I'm sure any marketer would love to have.
Probably so that people think it's OK to apply from other country and do so rather than use some friend's or temporary address in the US to get the notebook.
It just looks like a web browser. I thought Chrome OS was going to be a nice user interface which had websites appear like native apps. Instead, it's just a web browser. Not impressed at all. I expected more.
Could you be a bit more specific about what you were expecting? Did you think they could make it magically shoehorn web apps into a desktop metaphor? What more does it need than just a web browser, given that the whole point of Chrome OS is to be just a web browser?
It's a fair criticism. If the OS is a web browser, why use tabs? They just steal valuable screen real estate. Replace them with a windowing system where each page/app gets its own resizeable window, and you can reclaim some of the virtues of a desktop metaphor.
Are overlapping or tiled windows really that useful for web apps being squeezed in to a low-end 12" laptop screen?
They've got a system for chat windows and notifications to show up on top of the main window, and they've got a full-screen button to hide all the window decorations. The only real use a more complex window manager would have is enabling you to show two documents side by side, but I doubt that the horizontal screen resolution is high enough for that to work with most web apps.
I do think that overlapping and tiled windows are very useful for a 12" screen. They're certainly highly useful and desirable on my 13" Macbook screen.
But how many web apps (or any web sites) are actually useful when reduced to a width of 640px? Almost everything on the web these days is designed for a width that's far more than half of the 1280px that is the widest reasonable estimate for the Cr-48's screen. I've measured GMail, Picasa, and Google Docs as needing 795px, 813px, and 889px, respectively, and Pandora with its ads wants a window more than 1000px wide. If Google's going to show off side-by-side multitasking on a ChromeOS notebook, they'll have to use somebody else's web apps.
If "the cloud" starts to tread on more serious territory and people reach the point where they're willing an able to do things on the web that they would previously use a $1000+ computer for, then Google will have to revisit Chrome OS's basic paradigm. But until then, the main purpose for Chrome OS is to make a true netbook.
There are several applications for OSX which take a website and make it appear more like a native app.
The Windows Start Bar, the OSX dock, the OSX dashboard are all much nicer methods for managing apps than how ChromeOS appears to do it, and they've all been around for years. Google should have come up with something better than these for ChromeOS, not worse.
Not in the near term. During the Q&A, several questions were asked about tablets, including how the rise of iOS and Android tablets have affected the team's conception of what an ideal device would look like.
In all instances, the ChromeOS team members reiterated that from the very first day, their vision was to address the notebook form factor, because they're attempting to build a platform that can be used as their own primary device.
"Nothing but the web"??
How can you be so tantalizingly close to such a glorious tagline as "Nothing but net" and not use it?
AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!