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

Continue read­ing ChromeOS Reactions