The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 18, 2011 10:22 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net by PO8
Parent article: The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

I am not sure if ChromeOS will be a success but the potential target audience seems large to me. Based on the number of friends and relatives that rely on me for tech support, my impression is that most computer users just want their computers to work and really do not want to mess with things like administration and tweaking.

There is another article here on LWN about XFCE. In one of the comments, a poster talks about a relative that just used the icons on his desktop after a glitch caused the "applications" menu to disappear. He managed this way for weeks until the poster was able to stop by and fix it.

A lot of mainstream users consider gaming to be a core use for their devices so that is a legitimate issue to raise. That said, I think we do not understand how many people just want to use their computers for email, web browsing, and very simple document creation.

It is a bit humorous to me that us tech folks imagine that we are somehow the mainstream. Most people do not care about shell access. Most people are not developers. Most people are not computer enthusiasts. Most people, even many of the control freaks, just do not care about their computers enough to want to spend large amounts of time configuring and managing them.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 18, 2011 18:35 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

But, wouldn't those people be happier with an android Honeycomb based device? What is the appeal to ChromeOS over Android?

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 18, 2011 19:43 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (3 responses)

> A lot of mainstream users consider gaming to be a core use for their
> devices so that is a legitimate issue to raise.

Casual gamers on ChromeOS can play HTML5 or (ew) Adobe Flash games. Serious gamers will buy a serious game machine like the XBox or PS3.

There are definitely problems with ChromeOS (biggest one: why isn't it Android?), but games aren't one.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 19, 2011 7:33 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (1 responses)

Generally I agree about gaming - the proportion of Windows PC gamers is actually rather small compared to the massed ranks of those gaming on Xbox, PS3, portable devices (Nintendo DS etc) or smartphones/tablets.

However I do think in the longer term there will be a hybrid Chrome/Android, whereby most of your apps are in the cloud but you can run apps locally as well if required (possibly through offline-cloud features), for those times when there's no internet connection.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 27, 2011 6:55 UTC (Thu) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]

I honestly disagree. Despite the larger 'media blasting' of games like Halo or Gears of War, there's millions upon millions of PC gamers versus console gamers. Let's take it by the numbers: 50 million XBox 360s, 42 million PS3s, and about 76 million Wiis. Call it about 150 million overall active console gamers worldwide to account for older systems and overlap between platform ownership?

World of Warcraft and many other MMO's. WoW by itself accounts for 12 (yes, TWELVE) million active monthly accounts in late 2010: http://blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.htm...

StarCraft 1 or 2. Look at the Asian competitive gaming market, it's huge for these and other RTS/pseudo-RTS games like mobile-artillery-fire sorts as well. Those are around 15-20 million active gamers depending on which news report you look at in the last year, some even higher. I'll go with 15.

CounterStrike and Team Fortress 2. I'm unable to find accurate stats for these, so I'll count them at 0, but mentioned here.

Hell, even Minecraft. 1-mil copies sold right there, at least 500k of those actively playing every day from when the stats page worked a couple weeks ago; they're mid-migration to a fully cloud-based web interface, so the stats-tracking code isn't operational at the moment).

Just from that handful of PC games, in a single day, there's roughly a sixth of the entire sold working worldwide console game population accounted for. One out of six, without delving deeply into stats, just nailing the highlights.

And that's not even touching on things like PopCap games that sell well, or all the various niche markets below the size or visibility of Minecraft. Or how many owners of consoles are actually active on gaming on a daily basis.

So, no, Windows PC gamers are not a minority compared to Console gamers at all. And that doesn't even touch on the number of companies supporting Intel Mac gaming now since Steam started the charge. Or even cross-platform and well-liked games that have millions of downloads for their niche market like rRootage for SCHMUP players, or the millions and millions of daily gamers visiting sites like ArmorGames or Kongregate. Or hell... the grandparents playing Solitaire on their Windows PC instead of shuffling a physical deck of cards because their arthritis has gotten too bad. That's still PC gaming too instead of playing it on a console.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:13 UTC (Sat) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

> There are definitely problems with ChromeOS (biggest one: why isn't it Android?), but games aren't one.

Android cannot have ChromeOS, but why CromeOS couldn't have Android and anything that implies, starting from AppStore? Only thing needed is a Dalvik JavaVM and some desktop integration so that Android apps blend nicely to desktop and users can easily access stuff they've bought, right?

As ChromeOS verifies whole OS on bootup and doesn't allow users local shell or root access, pirating the commercial games should be harder than say on Windows. And if Java GLES games run fine on Android phones like is stated here:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/game-devel...

They should fly on a net/notebook. According to above article, many of the Android games (including popular ones) are just Java, rest may have e.g. native libraries wrapped for Java.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 22, 2011 18:49 UTC (Sat) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (3 responses)

Decade ago my dance instructor asked me whether I could help him with his computer (no idea how he identified me from the group as somebody who works with computers). It turned out his mails had been bouncing as they had viruses and he had bought a virus scanner which he wanted me to install. Unfortunate he had bought it for wrong Windows version, it worked only with newer ones. I think his eventual solution to the problem was to buy a new computer, this time with virus scanner pre-installed...

I'd say that most people don't want to install any software on their machines (games or other things), mostly because they cannot be sure it will succeed. If they don't have friends or relatives who do the computer administration for them, either the software (like MS-office) is pre-installed when they buy the computer or they take the machine to a shop for install. However, I have hard time imagining somebody doing that to get some new game to their machine.

Nowadays people just open e.g. their Facebook account and play (Flash) games that are there or do some casual gaming on gaming www-sites (which also use Flash). If they want 3D games, they buy a game console, but it's mostly kids and lonelier singles who have time for that kind of stuff. People with families are too busy for anything but casual gaming.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:17 UTC (Sat) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link] (2 responses)

Most everybody *has* Microsoft Office, no matter how it got there. So they can take their computer places that they don't have network access, and still use it for stuff. While some folks will be fine with that, I fear that most people will be unhappy with a portable computer that works properly only when they have an Internet connection for it.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:22 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

there are a lot of people with 'notebook' computers that only use them in places where there is electicity, and nowdays, just about all of those places have Internet access as well.

we will see how this works out.

The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net

Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:36 UTC (Sat) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

I've never used Google Docs, but AFAIK it has supported offline usage for about two years (with Google Gears), so why not having Internet for a while would be a problem?

Doesn't it also have (basic?) support for importing & exporting MS-Office document formats? At least .doc etc are listed on Google Docs pages as supported.