Google Chrome OS initial thoughts

Going through my daily RSS feeds and what do I find?  Google has officially announced their own Operating System.  Google Chrome OS.  After reading through the announcement, several things pop out at me.

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.

This paragraph alone covers some of the biggest issues that some of the non-technical people I know deal with and are frustrated with in PCs.  With Windows, you have a generally slow OS unless you’re running pretty recent hardware.  Viruses, malware, and security updates are things that these folks don’t really consider until their computer craps the bed.  Then they have to pay someone ridiculous amounts of money to get it fixed.  With Apple, they’ve generally avoided the malware issues, but updates are still required and it’s not a super-fast system either…unless you just bought a new one.  On top of that, there is the famous “Apple Tax” that comes with these sytems and in the current economy, some people just can’t afford it.

I’m curious to see how applications such as iTunes, MS Office, Photoshop, and others work on such a system – if at all.  Google states they don’t plan to release the first version until the second half of next year, and even then only on netbooks.  So, sometime in 2011, we’ll get a better feel for how this whole thing is going to go down.  One of the reasons I bought a Macbook a few years ago was that “it just worked”.  If Google Chrome OS can “just work” even better, I may be interested.  That being said, 1.0 releases of anything need a good bit of work.  See iPhone, Android, any Microsoft OS, Google Chrome Browser, etc.  I’m sure I’ll get my hands on a beta version as soon as I can, but don’t expect mass adoption for a couple of years.  I am looking forward to this, though – and might also look into some Google stock shares…

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Tags: google, google chrome browser, google chrome os

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:01 am and is filed under Apple, General, PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.