Hello World
This is my first attempt at blogging. I will try to be brief. I plan to use this blog to share my ideas.
Coming to the point
This is how Chrome OS can change the ecosystem.
Earlier when people first started using PCs they used "dumb" terminals to connect to powerful computers. This was replaced by the PC which was powerful and shifted all computation tasks to your home. We then had series of powerful processors which enabled servers and workstations to perform faster and faster. People became interested in Operating Systems.
The Internet was yet another turning point. People now became interested in distributed computing not just to perform scientific calculations but also to distribute the load of websites which started catering to millions of users.
As the needs of users change new architectures take shape. So Google is attempting to change it all with its new Chrome OS. We again have seemingly dumb netbooks and smart phones (much smarter than what we had earlier) which can connect to the Internet but barely run applications like full featured word processors let alone MATLAB and other softwares. So what is the solution? Ensure that such devices run a full featured web browser with well defined behavior and shift all the computational load to the Cloud. This is what Chrome OS would be doing. So how does Google plan to build an application ecosystem:
Well lots of acquisitions and supporting companies which make Good Webapps which parallel the usability of the PC with the netbook.
List of acquisitions
picnik.com - photo editing application that runs in your browser
aardvark (vark.com) - a new search model which searches for people who can answer your question rather than webpages containing it as there may be no webpage containing the answer to your question.
etherpad.com - a wonderful text editor
labpixies.com - created a lot of gadgets for iGoogle.
docverse.com - integration with MS Office
So where do the users get the good net speed for running all there applications on the cloud. Google is already setting up its own Gigabit ISP network in US.
The good thing is that this will make Chrome OS popular. The desktop environments on Linux have still not very popular among non geeks. So may be a smooth user experience will allow non geeks to start using Linux. Chrome OS will probably make Linux usable for such non geeks. And hopefully offloading the things on the cloud will ensure automated backups and security that people want.
What I would want is being able to run all applications smoothly through a web browser. would like a web based IDE for programming with compilation and execution offloaded to the cloud (possibly a new programming model for the new web based OSs) , ability to access Mathematica without installing it (wolfram alpha - no Google hasn't acquired this one), suggestions for webapps for viewing particular document types all integrated into the Chrome OS.
The bad thing with this is that some of the applications like etherpad and bumptop are not available for users until they are merged with the Google product line. But in the long term the users might get better applications.
