ChromeOS Reactions

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 objec­tion­able about ChromeOS is some­thing that very few peo­ple care com­ment­ing on. It’s related to the whole con­cept built into ChromeOS that all data lives in the cloud. I think that it is best put into words by an exchange that I had with my Angry Mac Bastards co-host John Welch dur­ing the announce­ment yes­ter­day. John observed that “… google is try­ing to become the sin­gle point of fail­ure for the inter­net.” To which I replied that, in the form of ChromeOS, Google is try­ing to become the sin­gle point of fail­ure for the entire com­put­ing experience.

I’m sure that the above obser­va­tion will elicit howls of rage about how won­der­fully open Google is, and how they can “do no evil,” as if a cute motto can over­come the neces­si­ties of cor­po­rate gov­er­nance. Instead of repeat­ing argu­ments that I’ve made before I’ll sim­ply link to an arti­cle that I wrote over a year ago. And at that, I’ll con­clude with one new obser­va­tion. It’s rel­a­tively uncon­tro­ver­sial to con­tend that Apple’s choke-point on iPhone app devel­op­ment (via the App Store approvals process) is a prob­lem. Why then, would it be a good thing to intro­duce an oper­at­ing sys­tem where the entire com­put­ing expe­ri­ence depends on a choke-point at Google. Single points of fail­ure are never a good idea.