The Mandelbear's Musings

Today's feeds included this post on ChromeOS by Cringely.

Last week Google made a preemptive strike against Microsoft, revealing details of its Chrome OS months before that product reaches its near-infinite beta release. The idea is simple: who needs a big OS if you are doing everything in a browser? It’s a huge threat to Microsoft and Apple. But then it struck me I’ve heard this all before, so I went back and found this video clip from my show Triumph of the Nerds, circa 1996, where Larry Ellison predicts the future, not knowing he was actually describing 2010.

It struck me that I've seen it before, too: Sun's Display Postscript. The difference is that Javascript is a far friendlier language to program in than Postscript, and that Chrome has some solid security behind it. We've learned a lot in the last two decades: Javascript was designed from the ground up for implementing the programming side of a user interface, and HTML 5 plus SVG on the front end are more than good enough to replace a 2-d graphics toolkit like GTK. So there's that.

Sun also invented the catch-phrase "the network is the computer", and NFS (which stands for Network File System, in case you've forgotten).

Cringe ends with:

We know that under the Chrome OS Google Apps will be very secure. Any tampering will trigger the download of a new and pure OS image. But will the Chrome OS have enough performance to compete with Microsoft Office? I think it eventually will, based, for example, on extensions like Google’s recently announced O3D API, which will allow Google Apps and approved third-party apps to grab spare GPU cycles to improve performance.

What’s left to be seen here is whether these improvements will be enough to beat Office or if Google will have to make a standalone (local PC-based) version of these apps. Only time will tell.

The most interesting part for me will be Microsoft’s response. This strikes at the very heart of Redmond’s business success and Microsoft will not take it lying down. Expect thermonuclear warfare.

What he seems to be forgetting is that it's going to be a three-front war. Down underneath ChromeOS, Android, Maemo, Moblin, and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix -- all of which are designed for mobile devices and thin clients -- is a perfectly functional Linux kernel. Mass storage is still dirt-cheap, and even after we get fiber to the home a suitcase full of hard drives will have more bandwidth than a pipeline to the cloud.

And a net app doesn't much care whether the back-end server it's talking to is in the next room or the next state, but you'll notice the performance difference. Heck, I notice the performance difference in my favorite audio editor between a local SATA drive and the same drive over gigabit ethernet.

Yeah, you'll back up to the cloud, use it for communication and sharing, and use it for deploying massive multi-user web applications. But all your applications will be running their front ends locally on Linux, so they can sneak behind the web to the local filesystem, and sneak behind the browser to X and the GPU, when you need performance. Your photos and music and video may be synchronized to a big server in the sky, but they'll all be in the fileserver in the closet, too. And some things won't get synced; the reasons are left as an exercise for the reader.

No matter what the (other) pundits are trying to claim, a URL is still a (virtual) pathname, a website is still a hierarchical filesystem (which you can of course mount with WebDAV), and the hierarchy of INTERconnected NETworks doesn't stop at your DSL modem or even at the ethernet port on the back of your PC. PCI is a network, too.

ChromeOS may take down Microsoft, and the Google Store may become a strong competitor for Apple. But is it the end of operating systems as we know them? I doubt it. Will you get all your applications from the Google Store? Probably not, any more than you'll get all your music from iTunes and all your books from Amazon. You'll hit some indy website, download to your local server, and away you go.