Case in Point

November 20th, 2009, by The Angry Drunk

No sooner do I com­ment on the overly cred­u­lous com­men­tary being offered up by the techno-sphere regard­ing the ChromeOS announce­ment than I notice this wretchedly mis-titled arti­cle over at TechCrunch: “Google Is Keeping Chrome OS Simple. Maybe Too Simple.”

Now, to be fair, this is Erick Schonfeld, and his deep abid­ing love of the Google-cock is well doc­u­mented, so I shouldn’t be sur­prised. But quotes like this really take things to a new level:

Rather than sup­port Android apps and other sorts of apps, there is only one kind of app Google is inter­ested in: the Web app. Chrome OS is all about mak­ing Web apps the only apps you will ever need. Which kind of makes you won­der how long we’ll need Android apps, or iPhone apps for that mat­ter, because you know it is only a mat­ter of time before a phone comes out run­ning on Chrome OS.

Seriously, Chrome web apps are now going to erad­i­cate stand­alone Android or iPhone apps? The same web apps that Steve Jobs pro­posed two years ago and was widely, and rightly derided over? Web apps cer­tainly have their place, but to even sug­gest that a phone run­ning noth­ing

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ChromeOS Reactions

November 20th, 2009, by The Angry Drunk

Yesterday Google unveiled their browser-as-operating-system con­cept, ChromeOS, in greater detail. I’m still pro­cess­ing the infor­ma­tion and I may, or may not, write up my thoughts on the announce­ments later. For the moment though I’m find­ing myself, as is often the case, more inter­ested in the reac­tion of the greater techno-sphere to the announcement.

I’m some­what bemused, although I really shouldn’t be, at the credulity of some of my fel­low trav­el­ers. I don’t doubt that Google is capa­ble of mar­ket­ing ChromeOS. Google cer­tainly has the money on hand to force them­selves into what­ever mar­ket they so choose, and the adop­tion of Android shows that they cer­tainly have the capa­bil­ity to pro­duce a ser­vice­able oper­at­ing sys­tem (even if it does largely lever­age Linux).

I also don’t hold with the seg­ment that dis­misses ChromeOS solely on grounds that it only runs web appli­ca­tions. I per­son­ally think that, at the moment, web apps are inher­ently infe­rior to a well-built desk­top appli­ca­tion, and I don’t see that sit­u­a­tion chang­ing in the near future. But if decades of Windows dom­i­nance has shown, your aver­age con­sumer is per­fectly will­ing to use an infe­rior prod­uct as long as it is cheap and con­ve­nient enough.

What I do find

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