Google Chrome OS (Operating System) - Take the old with the new
A couple of weeks ago Google took the wraps off a pretty remarkable internal project: a new Operating System based on a radical set of principles. People have been talking about the possibility of a Google OS for years, and in July Google admitted that they were working on something, but the audacity of their design took many by surprise.
What was not given much of a mention in the ensuing media event was how things have, to a certain degree, come full circle. In order to explain that statement, we need to go back 40 years to a time before iPods, the consumer Internet and even Windows.
40 years ago, any sort of useful computers were really expensive. As a result of this, ensuring that they were used to their full capacity was pretty much top of the list of requirements when designing an operating system to manage their resources. The way people solved this problem was by having 1 big computer that was accessed by many people at the same time. Everyone accessed the computer through a terminal. Each terminal was a effectively a window (if you will pardon the pun) onto the same computer. Due to this design, the software that ran on the computer tended to be very general, rather than designed for each specific user.
As time went by, and Moore's Law proved itself uncannily accurate, the cost of computers plummeted as their power increased. By the late 1980's it was financially viable for a company to buy each of its staff a computer each. Back then, that was a pretty remarkable concept. Kind of like coming up with a Nuclear Car! Suddenly the shackles of everyone sharing the same computer were broken, and people were free to install software on their machine specifically for their task at hand. Designers could install image management software, accountants could install spreadsheets and secretaries could spend all day playing solitaire.
As time went by, people realised that, however constrained the old ways of working were, there were a number of benefits. Firstly, you could log into any computer on the network and things would act in exactly the same way. Secondly, you didn't have to worry about installing or upgrading software, or backing up your machine, as you left all that to the IT guy.
When people started using the Internet, the paradigm shifted once again, back to a more "1970's" model. The crucial difference with the Internet was that people were accessing the main computer (the server) from anywhere on the planet, instead of the same business. But that was pretty much the only difference. Everything else worked in the old style. If we upgrade our website that you are looking at now, you don't need to upgrade anything on your PC. You just refresh the page. If you send an email through GMail, you don't worry about backing it up - Google do that for you automatically. And finally, if you go to an internet cafe to check that you got a reply to that email, the screen will look exactly the same as when you logged in at home.
What's interesting about the current model, and this is where Google are really trying to innovate with Chrome OS, is that we are currently using a mix and match approach of styles that, one could argue, is where a lot of the current problems of using a computer lie.
If you think about it, some tasks such is using Gmail or reading the BBC News website are using the old style approach. There is a central server (actually a bunch of servers, but for now you can think of them as one) that you connect to, which figures out what you want and then sends you the results. Other tasks, such as taking the photos off your digital camera, are specific to your computer. If you go to an internet cafe, and the laptop you downloaded your photos to is switched off, you're not getting your photos, no matter how adept you are.
If you think about things that people complain about when using a computer, they tend to fall on the 1980's side of the paradigm. Installing software. Backing up your computer. Getting rid of a virus. Upgrading Windows. Buying a new laptop and having to move all your programs and documents. Using someone elses computer and not being able to access your documents.
The way Google are thinking, you can easily remove these problems, all of them, in one fell swoop. The solution? Go back to the 1970s style of computing. Don't store anything on the computer itself. Store it on the Internet. All of the tasks that you carry out that require 'software' will be done online. Word processing. Photo management. Email. Do it all online.
That's the radical part. Do all of it online. Never install any software on your PC. Never upgrade any software. Never worry about losing your PC, because everything is online. If your laptop gets stolen, you don't need to worry about the personal data that is on it, because there isn't any.
There are a number of side-benefits to this approach. You don't need powerful PC's any more; just something that will run a web browser. They don't need large disks, as there's not much on them anyway - just enough of the system to load up a web browser. That makes the computers cheaper to build. But most importantly for Google, it means that people will do everything over the web, and that's where they get their gravy. Ads in all those apps. Ads on all those web searches. They don't care about people buying ever cheaper PC's because they don't sell PC's - they sell ads.
It all sounds fairly simple, but there is one achilles heal that they are counting will disappear as time goes by. That is the cost and quality of internet connectivity. For all this stuff to work, seamlessly, you need as much bandwidth as you can possibly get. Uploading 200 photos from a 12 megapixel camera needs serious bandwidth. Editing a video that you shot on your Flip camera? Even more. Google are betting that Moore's Law is going to apply to network connectivity in the same way that it has done for processor technology.
It's an interesting strategy and you can see why Google is trying to set that trend, but is it realistic at the moment? I've personally got lots of data that I store on my machines at home, Photos, documents, video and music. Storing this data on the cloud at the moment is going to be expensive and take a long time to retrieve. If I wanted to view the video of last Christmas from my HD camcorder, downloading that to view on my PC is going to take hours and cost me a lot in bandwidth transfer. The bandwidth available to us in the UK just isn't up to supporting this model at the moment.
Also consider thick end clients such as online gaming clients like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. You need to install the software on the machine to get the benefit of amazing graphics and responsiveness, you simply can't get that kind of quality through the wire right now.
So is Google Chrome OS going to take off? I think it might be very useful for business users with low bandwidth and graphics performance requirements, but for now, I'm keeping a thick client until the network connectivity makes this model usable.
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