Google’s Chrome OS very nicely addresses what I have been talking about on this blog. It provides the simplicity and compactness to work on many devices while offering the ability to do the kind of memory management necessary so high quality HD video and audio can be widely distributed. While there are many good reasons to be cynical of Google’s marketing; I whole heartedly applaud the idea of restablishing the PC operating system in the mind of the consumer.
There’s been a lot of banter about Chrome OS. I even took the time to respond to an opinion piece in the NYT. I generally deplore hype and have something cynical to say about it — and Google often begs for it with its arrogance. But today Google is spending it’s mindshare-capital to do us all a favor. It’s about time that Windows death grip on the consumer psyche be broken. Certainly Apple is not Apples to Microsofts Oranges.
PC OS’s are now ubiquitous. The few flavors are all a slightly different twist on the same bad idea of perpetual license one-size-fits-all computing with this crazy notion of one giant hairball universal configuration for every possible services available at all times. Today’s PC’s boot up like someone packing to go the winter Olympics to compete in every sport in a single carry on bag. They’ve always been a big mess of stuff inappropriately slammed together — each piece at a slight detriment to the next. It’s always been overkill to replace a typewriter and not quite enough to replace your TV and stereo. Now they’re used for business everywhere. Worst they’re inherently impossible to maintain. And that’s what Chrome OS is all about, use what you need, and don’t load what you don’t need. I hate to say paradigm shift … but it’s what the market needs, and Chrome OS, at least architecturally, is a worthwhile approach to creating that change. Who knows if Google can or will succeed or completely screw it up, but the game is afoot.
The classic rejoinder to this argument is “what about the mac?” The mac still basically follows the same broken perpetual license model with a less cumbersome implementation of an OS. Ironically some of the ideas in OSX reflect the advancements made by Jobs at NeXT, where boot configurations were tuned to specific tasks. NeXT was a victim of being too successful selling into the National Security Administration — which has an odd way of consuming a company and stifling commercial efforts and so it folded back into Apple. To me it’s the NeXT piece that makes OSX superior to Windows. The Mac advantage is it better memory management for graphics, which make it radically smoother for most of the things people notice — and that’s because it’s UNIX under the hood, like NeXT. I don’t particularly see any advantage to the current Mac user interface — that argument is a nonsense big-endian v. little-endian conundrum. People forgot that Microsoft and Apple spent years fighting each other over who stole what from whom first. The irony of course being that Apple pinched a lot of the clever interface ideas from Xerox. Apple is to Windows, what BMW is to Chrysler, but their both still internal combustion cars, one performs better and cost three times as much.
I hope that Chrome OS provides the kind of prodding the consumer electronics market needs to mature to be able to deliver devices that can drive video convergence. I’d be happy to have PCs as we know them go away, fading into our TV sets. Chrome OS is a massive step in the right direction — is it real? Who knows.
