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Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Honestly Google's bifurcation in supporting both Chrome OS and Android was, at least to me, a perplexing decision, as they seem fundamentally (competing UI's, similar market) to be incompatible roadmaps.

If touch tablets ends up upending the netbook category, then Chrome OS won't really have a home. It doesn't have the capability of taking advantage of advanced hardware, and netbook functionality might be fully accounted for by Android tablets. Chrome OS was an interesting bet in the direction of computing (smaller, inexpensive notebooks as the norm for Internet consumption and light office work), but things might not pan out the way Chrome's founders had thought.

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Two strong competitors in the OS market puts Google in a position to succeed regardless of the direction of the market.

Steve Ballmer said it quite right: Android was a bet on the technology of the past (OS, installable apps, etc), and Chrome OS is a bet on the future (webapps, light clients, etc.)

That was Ray Ozzie, not Ballmer.

Ha, I was just thinking that it sounded extremely insightful by Ballmer standards...

technology of the past (OS, installable apps, etc)

Except it turns out that obsolete stuff like local storage and direct hardware access and being able to run offline is actually sort of useful, which is why everybody is falling over themselves trying to jam all of it into HTML5.

Naming both their browser and their OS distro Chrome was a perplexing decision for me. Would not have killed them to have 2 distinct names. Less confusion.

In a way, though, thats kind of the point. The whole idea of Chrome OS is that the browser IS the operating system.

Looks like Google adopting 'confuse competitors' strategy (similar to Windows and OS/2).

I agree. What problem does Chrome OS solve?

Chrome OS is completely browser-centric & cloud-centric. While Android is a small device OS oriented to phones. Android also supports installing 3rd party applications, which my guess is Chrome doesn't.

I assume that Chrome OS will completely sync with Chrome on the desktop. This means that if you're working on your web-based apps on your computer, you'll be able to pick up your Chrome tablet and seamlessly continue the work and then switch back again.

Why couldn't that be done approximately as well on, say, Android, though? I don't see any particular reason why I'd pick a device based around Chrome OS when that device could run Android instead which seems able to do everything that Chrome OS can do and more.

In other words: what do Chrome OS's limitations add to the experience? It's interesting from a technical standpoint to build a fully-functioning system with Chrome OS's limitations, but how does it make a better product?

Android also supports installing 3rd party applications, which my guess is Chrome doesn't.

If that is true, then Chrome will certainly be violating the spirit if not the letter of software - "free software" that only allows you to do things on server controlled by someone else...

It's not so much that it solves a problem as much as that it presents an experience that some people want.

It is _exactly_ what I've wanted since netbooks came into existence, and I've put a lot of hours into setting up stripper Arch setups that do this.

Is it better than anything else on paper? No, but on paper isn't the only way to measure things (to the chagrin of us engineers). Sometimes less is more.

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