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The Google Chrome OS
The Google Blog has the
announcement for Google's upcoming new operating system, "Google Chrome
OS". It's Linux-based, but, like Android, it appears that much of the
software above the kernel will differ from a typical Linux distribution.
"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome
OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get
you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay
out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the
web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the
basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of
the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security
updates. It should just work."
(Log in to post comments)
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 15:13 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
OK, I guess it will be minimal kernel with a framebuffer window manager + Chrome (incl. HTML5 stuff and native client).
Everything will be associated to you Google account and probably backed up in the cloud. I think it will install updates without the user knowing and I wouldn't be surprised if Google uses the latest and greatest (KMS, Ksplice, SELinux (or some other security thing))
I could be quite powerful, but not my cup of tea. But I am sure it will be more mature than your average Fedora/Ubuntu/OpenSUSE/Mandrake release.(Meaning less RC bugs)
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 15:21 UTC (Wed) by leomilano (guest, #32220) [Link]
Overall, this will be a HUGE step forward for Open Source (and that collection of software we call "Linux"). I am not sure it will be more robust than any of the big distros. The focus of course is different to most distros: here the OS is a thin layer to access the web.
But the big point is that this has the Google tag on it, so people will use it with no fear. And Google is big enough that MS will not be able to kick them out of the table like they did with Linux on Netbooks.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 15:24 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
This thing has the potential to be WAY smaller/lighter than (for instance) XP -- making extra difficult for MS to install some Windows in the same platforms.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:06 UTC (Wed) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link]
People running Chrome OS won't know and won't care that it's based on open source or Linux. Also, Chrome OS probably won't contain "that collection of software we call Linux"; it sounds like it will be more like Android: a Linux kernel with totally different userland.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 9, 2009 11:56 UTC (Thu) by __alex (subscriber, #38036) [Link]
A forked Linux kernel at that.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 21:16 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]
Roughly equivalent to the huge step of Comcast using Linux in their set-top boxes. The OS is a thin layer to access the viewers' wallets.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:55 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] Overall, this will be a HUGE step forward for Open Source Not if the freedom aspect is the thing which draws you to open source (or, really, Free Software) in the first place. I'm sure we'll hear from the usual parade of people saying that if stuff like this makes Linux popular then "we've won!", but if/when we emerge with a bunch of offerings as locked down as those coming from Apple or Microsoft today, but which just happen to run Linux, any claim of victory will be a bit like taking credit for making the saddles used by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as they ride into town.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 15:22 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Google's mail and docs are already (theoretically *) usable offline. Updates are done via Google Gears. Possibly the system would accept suitably-signed updates (to kernel and other native parts) and install them silently.
* = my offline gmail does not seem to sychronize correctly. Whenever I go offline, it gives me a week-old version of my inbox.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:07 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> OK, I guess it will be minimal kernel with a framebuffer window manager + Chrome (incl. HTML5 stuff and native client).
A framebuffer-only windowing system will be substantially more inefficient then X... It would eliminate your ability to play any sort of game, have good video playback, etc etc. The major side effects would be much larger increase in CPU usage and dramatically lowered battery life.
> I could be quite powerful, but not my cup of tea. But I am sure it will be more mature than your average Fedora/Ubuntu/OpenSUSE/Mandrake release.(Meaning less RC bugs)
I really seriously doubt that. It's the level of complexity that matters.. Make a simple Linux setup and it'll have less bugs, but it will have substantially less functionality and be much less capable then a more complex Linux setup.
Big complaints about Linux based netbooks involve difficulty installing software, getting new versions of firefox, installing favorite applications from Windows, setting up printers, setting up vpns, etc etc.
Unless Google OS is going to address those sort of things then it's going to be a failure out the gate. Those are things people require in their personal computers and are relatively easy to do in Windows. Pretending that people don't want flexibility and then creating a new OS that depends on eliminating 80-90% the functionality that you get from a Windows or Linux install isn't going to convince people that they can live entirely from Google's cloud.
The best thing Google can do right now to make a 'Google OS' is to take a Moblin compliant Ubuntu version and modify the GUI to make everything center around Google's online apps and services.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:46 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Why would Chrome (the browser) as a windowing system have to be any less efficient than X? There's no reason it couldn't use the same kernel features that X uses. Obviously, just using the framebuffer API would be less efficient, but using DRI and such isn't impossible, and it may be easier to optimize things like video when there is only one video playback widget, which is part of the widget set and provided to javascript, <video>, flash, etc.
I think looking at this as competing with the Windows desktop is thinking about it entirely wrong. It's like saying that televisions are never going to be popular because they can't run people's favorite applications. The idea with this would be that it's just a web browser. It doesn't have a userspace that can run other native programs. Programs are all in Javascript or Flash, and Google is doing this because they think that the available sites are sufficient to do everything that people regularly want to do with their computers (at least, those people whose game playing is on consoles and flash).
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:53 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Why would Chrome (the browser) as a windowing system have to be any less efficient than X? There's no reason it couldn't use the same kernel features that X uses. Obviously, just using the framebuffer API would be less efficient, but using DRI and such isn't impossible, and it may be easier to optimize things like video when there is only one video playback widget, which is part of the widget set and provided to javascript, <video>, flash, etc.
If you don't want to use X and you want good performance then you'll have to figure out your own acceleration framework. It won't be a simple framebuffer driver because a simple framebuffer driver provides no means to take advantage of any GPU features.
So, sure, you could possibly do Wayland or recreate the standalone OpenGL application, but for what purpose? Just so you don't have to use XCB?
Wayland has possibilities because GTK is ported to Wayland's native API and Google's Chrome for Linux uses GTK. But even then it's going to require a lot of work on Google's part to reach feature parity with just using what everybody else already uses. Think about multi-monitor support, HDMI output, input hotplugging, etc etc. There is a LOT of things that Xorg does for you that Google would either go without or have to recreate on their own.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:59 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
> A framebuffer-only windowing system will be substantially more inefficient
> then X... It would eliminate your ability to play any sort of game, have > good video playback, etc etc. The major side effects would be much larger > increase in CPU usage and dramatically lowered battery life.
Google seems to have some big plans for the web browser. Maybe they hope they can make them run any sort of program. Just take a look at
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 17:24 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Javascript bindings don't mean squat unless you have something to accelerate them. I don't care if the game is 3D, in your browser, or full screen 2D or anything like that or outside the browser or anything like that. It's irrelevant.
A framebuffer driver is just that.. you take information and you write it out to a framebuffer. It's a memory region. It does not get you any sort of OpenGL acceleration or hardware scaling or accelerated YUV to RGB conversion or anything like that. Your worse off, efficiency-wise, with a plain FB driver then you were back in VGA graphics days.
Xorg provides a framework for 2D and 3D acceleration. It's almost always going to have better performance then a simple FB driver unless something is severely broken.
If you don't want to use Xorg then you have to replace it with something else.
Wayland is a possibility and it provides it's own 2D and 3D acceleration whatnot. But it's not mature.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 19:55 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]
drag, you might like to have a look at e.g. DirectFB.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 20:44 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Oh. Thank you for pointing that out. I have forgotten about that and it does look like it's under development still, which is a bit surprising.
Apologies to above people if they were thinking about DirectFB instead of just a plain "framebuffer".
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 9, 2009 7:50 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]
>Big complaints about Linux based netbooks involve difficulty installing software,
Given that in the 'Chrome OS' you'll use only web application, this will be 'solved' by not letting you use those traditional applications.
> getting new versions of firefox,
'Solved' again by not letting you use those applications.
> setting up printers,
The issue is the same here as the kernel is Linux the drivers are the same.
> setting up vpns, etc etc.
Solved by using https.
Now I must admit that I don't understand the interest of a Chrome OS compared to running Chrome on a normal Linux distribution.. You can already easily use Linux in a 'thin client' setup, so what's the interest of restricting it to running web application?
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 9, 2009 8:13 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Given that in the 'Chrome OS' you'll use only web application, this will be 'solved' by not letting you use those traditional applications.
Ha. :)
If you make it hard to use traditional applications it won't make people not want to use those applications, it'll just make them not want to run your OS.
> 'Solved' again by not letting you use those applications.
Yep. And users will 'solve' the problem the same way that they solved the problem for older Netbook "web centric" Linux OSes.. get somebody to install Windows over it.
> The issue is the same here as the kernel is Linux the drivers are the same.
Printer drivers are not Linux kernel drivers. They are userspace. You need to have some speciality programs to support crappy printers that are so dumb that they can't understand postscript, but even then they don't have anything to do with the kernel. It's done through things like libusb and printer port-over-USB and whatnot. It doesn't require much of anything from the kernel.
Then for smarter devices that can take postscript you still need ppd files and ghostscript-related stuff to modify and create printer-specific postscript pages on the fly.. that is if you want anything more complex then single sided page black and white print output. And for network printers you need to have SMB support, IPP, and all that sort of stuff. And then you need CUPS and you need to have applications to manage and configure them. Then you need to have a notification system so people can deal with printer queues and cancel print jobs and get notified when print jobs are finished.
Printer problems are all userspace problems. I wonder if Google is smart enough to figure out how to make a web application speek to a network'd laser printer... :)
> Solved by using https.
Except people very rarely use HTTPs for their work or even home VPNs. For the most part they are restricted to using whatever their work has set up for them or whatever came with their el'cheapo home router. Using something like IPsec, PPTP, or Cicso VPN will be much more common requirements.
Remember it's the user that sets the requirements for the OS. If the OS does not meet those requirements then the users are not going to change their requirements... they are simply going to use something else, and that something else is probably just going to be Windows.
:)
Why not? Posted Jul 9, 2009 16:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Printer problems are all userspace problems. I wonder if Google is smart enough to figure out how to make a web application speek to a network'd laser printer... :)You only need to extend browser a bit to make it possible to access raw printer device from it - and then printer supplier can run printer driver in a box...
Why not? Posted Jul 9, 2009 17:33 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well I can use 'cat' to dump a postscript file into /dev/ file and get a printer to work. That's very simple thing to do.
But it still doesn't really help much. You still need a way to edit postscript files on the fly to add in commands for color or front-to-back printing. Then you still need a way to deal with network printers. And no 'native code' drivers exist for dumb inkjet printer, etc etc.
In order to do printing with 'just a browser on a kernel' your going to essentially have to recreate all the functionality provided by gnome printer dialog, samba, cups, ghostscript, gnome notification system, usb hotplug, network autodiscover protocol support, and probably half a dozen other little things. Printers are a huge PITA and I hate them and they are relatively hard thing to support.
Now granted it's certainly possible to have a browser handle all that, but it would be rather insane.
It is my fondest wish that Google would simply let a distribution handle that and do something like run 'Chrome OS' on top of a Moblin Compliant OpenSuse or Ubuntu OS.
Why not? Posted Jul 12, 2009 10:29 UTC (Sun) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link] "In order to do printing with 'just a browser on a kernel'..."...you're going to need for your webapp / cloud server to understand how to output your document in your printers language, and you're going to need your browser to let you send that file to your printer. Why would you need your printer drivers to be stored locally, if your documents aren't?
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 15:30 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
Should we really celebrate the replacement of a proprietary operating
system with a free operating system which exists primarily as a shim to proprietary code running elsewhere? In the sense that the local code is free, and that one can (presumably) easily install free tools upon it, the answer is perhaps a highly qualified maybe. But loathing of Microsoft is not in and of itself a principle to justify half-measures of freedom elsewhere. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 15:58 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
I'm curious about this "redesigned underlying security architecture", in case it turns out to be something we can take and use in other contexts. But, in general... +1.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:10 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> Should we really celebrate the replacement of a proprietary operating system with a free operating system which exists primarily as a shim to proprietary code running elsewhere?
Well, it's up to us to create good enough FOSS code so that popular web services use it.
And even proprietary web services still tend to use a lot of FOSS code - Linux, Apache/Lighttpd/etc., MySQL/Postgres/etc. and so forth. A proprietary web service might be a small amount of non-FOSS code running on top of all of that. (Google actually might be the exception here, given their use of their proprietary infrastructure, although even that runs Linux).
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:17 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Google's Web applications are essentially proprietary. Even though you can get the source code for some elements, mostly from non-google sources, the actual software you end up using is a black box.
You can't examine how it works, you can't modify it, you can't learn from it, you can't redistribute it, etc etc.
It's not something that bothers me a whole lot, but I do tend to prefer desktop applications over web applications. They are better behaved, have better performance, have lot more features, I end up having a lot more control, and the architecture of having software installed on the PC is a distributed one and scales much much much better then web-based applications or cloud-based applications.
(But that won't stop me from recommending Google's services for people that would benefit from them. For example a small business with no IT infrastructure would be much better off using Gmail and Google's calendering stuff (among other stuff) rather then resorting to hiring somebody to setup Zimbra or Exchange.)
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:16 UTC (Wed) by gnb (subscriber, #5132) [Link]
If it prods hardware vendors into making sure the kernel supports their kit
there will be a benefit for the regular Linux distros as well.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:12 UTC (Wed) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link]
Yep, more Poulsbo blobs for everyone!
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:24 UTC (Wed) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] Well, I think that it's very important that the local code is free, and that it is talking standard protocols (HTTP, HTML5, etc). That means that even if certain parts of it talk to proprietary software out of the box (such as Google apps), there's no reason that you couldn't reconfigure it to point to free apps. Is this really all that different than Firefox defaulting to Google Search? Perhaps that is a bad thing, but I think the fact that you can change your search engine, and the local code is free, pretty much eliminates any real issues that I would have with that setup.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:32 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Search engines and other web centric apps aren't quite the same thing. A lot
of data can be locked into a web app and there are privacy issues for example. We shouldn't be quick to dismiss such concerns. They exist and they are often very valid.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:09 UTC (Wed) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] Oh, I'm not saying that you should dismiss the arguments against proprietary software running on the server. Just that the client is relatively independent, and as long as it is running all open code and talking open protocols, then creating a good client is a net gain. If Google produces a good, Linux based netbook, with a reasonable free software stack on top of it, that's interesting in itself, and you should be able to disconnect it from their proprietary services if you want to. Now, of course, you do have to make sure it really is an open stack. If it's an Apple-style open on the bottom but with closed software on top, then it has some more serious issues, and could lock you into Google's services much more strongly.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:34 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
The Franklin Street statement go to the heart of the matter:
http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/
I don't think you can aim all the ire at Google with regard to non-open webservices. The entire SaaS landscape is a problem for a long term sustainable culture of open development. There's a lot of finger pointing to go around. How many popular webservices business make significant use of open software to build their services and yet don't make that service code openly available? Google is only different in that they are singularly too big to ignore in terms of impact. But make no mistake, the problem has been here for a while now.
Proponents of open development are behind the curve here in making a strong case for the benefits of making SaaS codebases available to users and external developers. Has a new cultural leader stepped forward to champion open development in the SaaS landscape? Or are we relying on our greybeards to make the case? Maybe the fight to see a widespread open SaaS culture is going to require a generational change of leadership and some new tactics. Unfortunately, it seems to me, some of the most outspoken proponents of open source currently are trying to build closed SaaS businesses themselves so its not clear to me if there is a new generational leader to be found. But maybe Google as a competitor in OS, browser and webservices spaces will inspire someone into action on the open SaaS front.
-jef
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 17:15 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Who says the code running elsewhere is proprietary? Obviously, Google hopes that people will use this to access Google's sites a lot of the time, but there's no reason people couldn't have an open-source-based site on an in-house server which each family member accesses through a Chrome machine. It's all going over standard protocols, and Google is even working on standardizing things like inter-server-office-document-collaboration-over-XMPP.
I think that there's a good chance that people who want the simplicity of Chrome but don't want to outsource hosting their files to Google will do a certain amount of converting their old computers to headless Linux servers running software similar to the server side of Google Docs (without the cloud aspect), which could be open source as well. I wouldn't expect a lot of people to make that particular transition, but I'd expect more people to go that way than would switch to open source software without anything else going on.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 17:34 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Who says the code running elsewhere is proprietary?
It's essentially proprietary.
Unless you can view the code, learn how it works, edit it, fix it, improve it, redistribute it, etc etc then its in effect proprietary. If you don't want to call it 'proprietary' then fine, but the effect is the same.
Sure you can get portions of the web applications as open source, but that is not going to enable to you to setup a Gmail server on you private network or anything like that.
It's just a fundamental reality of the situation. If it does not bother you then that's fine (it does not bother me*), but it does not really change the fact that Google Apps and Gmail and all that are closed source apps running on open source platform.
* I think that SaaS and 'cloud computing' are doomed from the start as desktop-replacement. It's a architecture that is centralized and not distributed and as such it will never come close to same level of scalability and performance that you get from letting people have applications installed on their own systems.
In otherwords.. managing and running something like Google Apps or other Cloud based system is going to be quite a bit more expensive and difficult then distributing software.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:52 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
You can't set up a Gmail(tm) server on your home network, but you can set up courier webmail on your home network. Why would you even want to set up a Gmail server? Gmail whitespace-mangles patches, and is therefore useless.
You can't set up a Google Apps server on your home network, but you'll probably be able to set up an open source replacement. And there are enough nice things about Google Docs[*] that would carry over that I think people will be tempted away from the local desktop to SaaS just in time to decide that they don't want this to be something run by someone else. Google has published a draft of a server-to-server that Docs will support, so it's likely that there will be open source implementations that interoperate with Google Docs, and that people will start installing these in their homes as an alternative to having documents scattered on each computer in the house.
I think access to a server run by Google or an ISP will never be as good as the local desktop, but access to a server on the local network probably will be.
[*] One of the most remarkable things I've done is solve crossword-like puzzles as a team on Google Docs. There were times that I was working with people on different continents without realizing it, and times when everyone working on it was in the same room, and it was the best available method in both cases. We were, at times, filling in answers faster than would be possible with paper and pencils, since people would collide or block each other's vision while writing.
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 21:15 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Why would you even want to set up a Gmail server? Gmail whitespace-mangles patches, and is therefore useless.
I donno. Lots of people seem to like it.
I actually do have a personal email server, but that's besides the point.
One possible reason:
Normally if I wanted to setup a secure network then I would be very very careful about what sort of things I allow on it. Preferably no network access at all. Once your inside the network it's trivial to circumvent any sort of network security by using various tunnelling protocols. I've tunnelled through restrictive http proxies using openvpn. Tunnelled out of networks over DNS, and other happy stuff of that sort.
If I have users that depend on email, but need to operate in a secure intranet-only network, then it would make sense to setup webmail on a server on the 'secure' network and make people use that for checking up on things. Then that server would have a separate network access to a external network. I would definitely not want to allow even https over a proxy to contact Gmail, but Gmail is a familiar interface for people so maybe I'd want to provide that on the server.
That's just one possibility.
Otherwise there are nice search features and anti-spam stuff that Google does that are very proprietary that many people would probably want to learn from.
*shrug*
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 9, 2009 1:05 UTC (Thu) by jmm82 (subscriber, #59425) [Link]
I use Gmail and like it. I own 8 computers(7 linux and one Windows xp/Windows Vista for testing) I appreciate Gmail and beyond that Google Docs and spreadsheets because I can access them from any computer and they all work rather well. The Google Docs keep history of changes and you can share Docs and control access with other people, easily. While I'm not the average computer user, I am the average Linux user. I will continue to use a GNU/Linux distro and Google apps, but not Chrome.
How big is it Posted Jul 8, 2009 16:43 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I have a question about this Chrome OS. Is it a huge bet for Google (i.e. are they betting their business on it), a journey into an untapped market, or just a side business?I can imagine that Android is just a way to expand their business. Likewise, Chrome OS is probably not that vital to their survival. But even though they currently own the web (well, not all of it but a substantial chunk) they have not made great inroads into the desktop. Are they worried about the competition and are they feeling the need to get more horizontal over their competitors' integral offerings? Or are they ready to finally take on Microsoft on their home ground? It would be great to hear from other readers.
How big is it Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:50 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]
I don't really think Google execs spend a lot of time thinking about going up against Microsoft per se. Meaning I don't think they ever intend to significantly get out of the web search/advertisements business and start pushing operating systems and business applications as their primary "product".
Google is very aware of what their bread and butter is. They get ad revenue by becoming the ubiquitous web platform. They want to push that kind of influence more and more. Sometimes Microsoft gets in the way of that. But Microsoft also helps (by providing most of the OS/Web browsers that "internet clients" run). What Google wants is to squeeze as much power/influence as the can over what they can put on the OS/Web Browser. Enter Android and Chrome OS.
Filling the device gap Posted Jul 8, 2009 18:58 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
I agree with most of what you say, except for this last part:
"What Google wants is to squeeze as much power/influence as the can over what they can put on the OS/Web Browser. "
I think it is even simpler. Google wants more devices to access the web and MS does not actually do a very good job at that.
MS (and most cell phone manufacturers) prevent the creation of cheaper low end web devices, google sees this gap and wants someone (they don't care who) to fill it. They see that since there is a device gap, they are losing potential customers. The faster they can fill this potential burgeoning device gap, the better...
"Enter Android and Chrome OS."
Filling the device gap Posted Jul 8, 2009 21:32 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well fundamentally, if Microsoft controls the only viable platform for your business to run it's applications on then they control your business.
Look at what happened to Novell. Microsoft is able to provide tight integration between Windows Desktop, Office, and Active Directory and make it all work by 'default'. This required very little skill and was cheap to setup and get working. Novell on the other hand required very experienced people to setup the same thing and was much more expensive to deploy.
So Novell lost hard and now AD is the defacto standard method for managing corporate desktop environments.
Microsoft controlled the only viable platform for deploying Novell's software so Novell could not compete, even though their solutions were technically superior in most respects.
And it's the same thing with WWW. Microsoft, for the longest time, controls the only viable platform for reaching the majority of users out there. That's why it's a pipe dream that will never come true that web applications on browsers will displace the importance of Windows.
Microsoft has to much control over your platform.
Witness the debates over the <video> tag and such. Apple may be acting like a huge dick and throwing a wrench into the entire thing, but fundamentally everybody knows it's mostly irrelevant unless Microsoft decides to add video tag support to IE, which they won't do.
If they don't do that then turns something that exceptionally trivial to deploy* and turns into a major headache were you need to support the current way of doing things + the new video-tag way.
*(streaming video via video tag is so cheap and easy it is just massively blows away any competition. Try it sometime, it's laughable how simple video tag makes things. To RTSP server, no flash BS, no special software, no Apache modules, no nothing. Just drop the video file on your server and point at it like it was a jpeg image.)
And even if Chrome and Firefox do overthrow IE as the dominate browser it is only one small step. Microsoft still controls the platforms that they run on and will still be able to limit the viability of it and push their own solutions forward.
Filling the device gap Posted Jul 8, 2009 21:47 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
Great rant... but why does this explain google creating its own OS, how does it help their bottom line?
Me thinks simpler things are more important, especially when they fit the bill. Not to discount all the other reasons you mention as promoting the same cause, but there really is a simpler motive for google. It is a no brainer if google can get more people online more often to access their services more often to bring them more money. Not evil, not some grand idealistic scheme either, just a simple one.
Filling the device gap Posted Jul 8, 2009 22:11 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Great rant... but why does this explain google creating its own OS, how does it help their bottom line?
Because if they can create their own OS and make it attractive then they can provide a solution that has a fully integrated stack from top to bottom very much similar to what Microsoft has with Active Directory...
Not the same thing, mind you, Microsoft targets corporations were Google is more going after individuals... but similar in concept.
Google mail, Google IM, Google Office, Google VoIP, Google Search, Google Calendering, etc etc. Everything is tightly integrated and 'just works' and is setup by default. Every aspect of the system is configured by default to make those things work as well as possible. All of it working together to provide a seamless solution that competitors are not going to be able to deal with easily.
Google won't be able to provide that same level of integration if they are dependent on Microsoft Windows based platform to reach their customers.
That's all. I know I am restating things, but its hard for me to tell if I am being clear or not.
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> Me thinks simpler things are more important, especially when they fit the bill. Not to discount all the other reasons you mention as promoting the same cause, but there really is a simpler motive for google. It is a no brainer if google can get more people online more often to access their services more often to bring them more money. Not evil, not some grand idealistic scheme either, just a simple one.
I think right now the Android stuff and Chrome OS stuff is probing the possibilities and trying to generate more hype and keep people interested in Google.
Right now I expect that Google has lots of excess capital. It's expected of them to use that to try to expand their markets and try to come up with new ways to attract customers and generate revenue. It's not expected that they win every time... even if they try a 100 different things and only 10 or 20 succeed and 1-2 succeed very well then that will more then make up for the losses caused by the failures.
So this is 'throw the pasta at the wall and see if it sticks' type thing. Chrome OS and Android are more research then anything else. Especially Chrome OS, I think that Android is a much more serious effort, but still it's very experimental.
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Another way to look at it is...
It's just a large corporation trying to play games, if you want to look at it that way. I am sure that for a corporation of Google's type it would be a feather in their cap to take another hunk out of Microsoft.
This sort of thing is not that uncommon, even if it does not make a lot of sense. It's human nature. Go and look at the NY skyline or any large city and you'll see huge business buildings erected for this or that corporation.
It's purely a phallic symbol.. a 'mine is bigger then yours' type thing. It gets exponentially more expensive to build taller and taller buildings. I have heard that due to the infrastructure required and all the extra expenses that it makes almost no economic sense to ever build a office building above 30 stories or so. Even in expensive areas. So those large buildings are just trophies.
Google OS certainly has a business potential, but ya it could quite possibly be more a Ego booster then anything else...
Filling the device gap Posted Jul 9, 2009 6:48 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I like your explanation much better too. Just doing an OS "because they can" makes no sense, and besides they have Android already. Fear of platform competition is more interesting, but Microsoft has done all their bag of dirty tricks by now (defaults, breakage, embracing+extending, bundling) with ~90% platform dominance and it has not been enough.But, having a barebones OS for pervasive devices can be a huge target for Google. Netbooks and smartphones are just a first step; once we have a semi-capable computer on most appliances things start to get interesting.
Nothing new onder the sky Posted Jul 8, 2009 19:56 UTC (Wed) by xlab (guest, #59190) [Link]
To have a limited Linux distribution to only use a Browser?
I rather use Moblin, gOS cloud, or any tuned Linux that boots in under 15 seconds to have a full Linux experience. You could even use instant-on BIOS linuxes such as SplashTop or Presto, that boot in 3 secs and have FireFox, Skype and anything you'd like to install.
Quote from The Register Posted Jul 8, 2009 20:29 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]
Interesting quote from The Register:
"No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google's vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business."
Full story here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/08/google_microsoft_...
The Google Chrome OS Posted Jul 8, 2009 23:04 UTC (Wed) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]
Interesting.
Despite them calling it an operating system, it seems to be Linux with a web browser. That means they'll have to solve thousands of different printing problems, proprietary WLAN sign-in systems, 3G data access cards etc. Those are things we could all benefit from.
I know, Linux is ready for the desktop and all, but watching users struggle with projectors, all kinds of peripherals, and exotic network access in the real world can be painful. It needs to be much easier than it is with Windows, and that's not the case today.
All these problems are not so tought to solve... Posted Jul 9, 2009 1:39 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Apple does it nicely. And it's not hard to see why Apple can do this while Linux distributors can not. Uniformity. Apple dictates what goes where. If you don't want to play by rules... tough. Linux developers are constantly reinventing the wheel: GNOME-VFS vs KIO, init vs upstart, ALSA vs OSS vs PulseAudio vs ... . And programs are trying to be compatible with all this zoo - and as result support everything poorly. What Google does is basically reset: number of APIs offered to programs will be very small (I sure hope they'll offer something beyong HTML+JS to the mix), but it'll be there. Guaranteed. This can make life of ISVs much simpler - and this will lead to more robust programs and happier users. Will lovers of Emacs and/or VIM be disappointed? Sure. But they are minority and they are clearly not the target of this Chrome OS...
All these problems are not so tought to solve... Posted Jul 9, 2009 6:58 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I note that with the possible exception of sound APIs, all your examples
are fatally flawed.
GNOME-VFS versus KIO: these are integral parts of different toolkits (and
init versus upstart: why would this affect programs? The odd daemon's
ALSA vs OSS versus PA: This *is* a swine. Linux programs can always use
But there aren't many examples as bad as that. There's one libpng, one
All these problems are not so tought to solve... Posted Jul 9, 2009 8:34 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> OSS3 works to some degree on Linux and works everywhere else:
What's 'everywere else'? Windows, OS X? Nope.. it's just restricted mostly to Solaris and the BSD distros. Alsa screwed up by trying to be too much. It should of been divided up between application apis and low-level APIs that application developers shouldn't really use.. but it's too late now.
But all of that is why it's silly to program for OSS or Alsa in any case. If you program OSS you may be using a 'standard'... but it's a standard that only the tiniest minority of people actually use for operating systems that are the least likely to be used on the desktop. Instead you target something like 'SDL' or Gstreamer or whatever other higher level library and you get compatibility not only with OSS and Alsa, but also with Windows and OS X (generally).
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It's probably worth noting that WebOS from Palm for the Palm Pre, which is a lower-end smart phone uses Alsa, Gstreamer, and PulseAudio for their stuff.
As well as dbus, upstart (and actually use upstart as upstart rather then just in sysv init emulation mode like most distros). :)
So the desktop architect folks must be doing something right.. and all that stuff can happily run on a phone, so it should be possible to make it all perform well for a desktop or netbook.
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Oh and GVFS was a good move also. Besides some early teething problems I've had much superior results using GVFS then ever with Gnome-VFS. It's been more useful and more stable.
The FUSE feature is invaluable.. before I couldn't really use Gnome-VFS for much since many of my applications were not Gnome and thus not compatible... so I would have to resort to doing things like searching for SMB servers using Gnome's 'windows network' feature and then once I got it working in gnome I'd have to get it working on the command line. Nowadays I can use the GUI for searching and mounting and then just use ~/.gvfs.
It's very nice.
All these problems are not so tought to solve... Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:11 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Agreed. I rushed that part of the comment so as not to miss a train and failed to mention just how limited the installed base of OSS users actually is. (I meant 'all Unixes' when I said 'everywhere', but of course that was wrong: as you mention, the largest Unix installed base these days is MacOS X.)
Using gstreamer would be a good idea, but a lot of people ran scared of it after the gstreamer 0.10 transition, in case it transitioned again and perhaps because the 0.x version number promised a transition. I don't know why they don't just drop the zero and redesignate it 1.x (so we'd be at 1.24 now, or something like that).
It was years before I had more than one or two users of gstreamer on my system, and it wasn't until I installed KDE4 that the majority of my media playback started to use gstreamer. (Maybe people doing recording and manipulation would have been heavy users earlier, I don't know.)
All these problems are not so tought to solve... Posted Jul 17, 2009 22:37 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] Apple does it nicely No they don't. As you said, they have a closed ecosystem. They've been doing it for a long time and they are the last one of many who did that survived. Not even Google can bootstrap their own market today. And if I'm wrong, if it's Linux under the hood, we'll benefit somehow. What Google does is basically reset: number of APIs offered to programs will be very small If you can't connect to the printer at your hotel, Chrome netbooks won't make as much as a dent in the market, I promise.
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