Thursday, December 23, 2010

There Is No Cloud OS

Google Chrome IconImage via Wikipedia
Paul Buchheit: The Cloud OS: The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet .... Apple is lame for not allowing a native Gmail app on the iPhone -- email is the one place where Android really outshines the iPhone for me ...... One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it's spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user. ..... the development of this global super-computer is one of the most important technological advances in history. ..... the design target of ChromeOS. They are building laptops that run the Chrome web browser and approximately nothing else. ..... ChromeOS assumes a mouse/track-pad while Android currently assumes a touch interface ... and ultimately everything may end up with a touch screen anyway.
There is the cloud. But the OS resides firmly on your laptop. It is thin. It only runs a browser, and that browser takes you to the cloud, but the OS is not in the cloud. So the term cloud OS is misleading.

It is not even an OS for the cloud. It is an OS for a browser. The browser is not in the cloud either.
Image representing Android as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
And as to Paul's main point, he is flat wrong. There is space for Android, obviously, but there is also definitely space for the Chrome OS. The Chrome OS is going to cannibalize the PC in ways that Android can not.

And he is also wrong in asserting that all screens will end up being touch screens. There is just something about the keyboard.

Windows will die, not the Chrome OS. The Chrome OS will eat up Windows.
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