Paul Buchheit’s Prediction Is More Of A Warning
tomstechblog.com
tomstechblog.com
Counterpoint one: If I treated an Android device like a Chrome OS device, i.e. using nothing but the browser, it pretty much would be. Counterpoint two: All that Android would have to change to satisfy that requirement is to default to storing data on a "cloud" filesystem.
If you stopped at storing in the could, there would be huge drawbacks. If you stored in the cloud and cached locally, then a lot of the drawbacks are mitigated.
Some co-workers (of mine) are working on a system to make that property true for any laptop and any operating system. (It obviously involves virtualization and sending (encrypted) hard disk diffs around.)
If everyone restricted their FaceBook statuses to 140 characters, you'd have Twitter. Twitter is literally a strict subset of the functionality of the technical functionality of FaceBook. But that hasn't stopped it from becoming popular: Twitter's limited feature set provides a social cue for how to use it, and so people continue to use it for that purpose even when there are alternatives that can do that and more.
Google's goal here is to prove a cloud based environment is viable without native access. That's what ChromeOS does.
So yes, from a technical perspective you're absolutely right. But from a real world perspective Android could never do what Google hopes ChromeOS will.
Edit: jsmcgd's comment in this same thread makes a good point. ChromeOS' killer feature (if it succeeds) is "storing everything in the cloud" and you don't get that just by storing some things.
I agree that #1 is usually a good idea, although there are times when I specifically don't want it. And Android could and should support transparent cloud storage with minimal changes. I don't agree with #2 at all. HTML+JS+CSS is far from an ideal application framework; after many years we've gotten to the point where it mostly works, but there are plenty of cases where native apps provide a much better experience.
It's like accessing your email via a desktop client but always having the option to access it via a web interface. If you shift the assumptions slightly so that you've not always got access to the exact same desktop machine then just a good web interface across all the machines you use starts to get competitive.
Plus there's the security benefits of a limited core functionality.
Google's misguided approach here not only hurts them but others, like Motorola and carriers, who have bet big on Android success. I think they should put all their forces behind Android. They'll need all they've got to beat Apple.
Where does the obviously false folk belief that one OS is the ideal number come from?
You might, however, run Chrome OS on a tablet that's built for Android, or Android on a Chrome OS netbook. Google has made two potentially competing OSes, and that's the big difference.
reference please.
I think Google was still caught in thinking Android solely in terms of a system for phones and pushing Chrome OS (and untested OS, still under development) for larger devices.
I talked to people at Google, just developers not themanager of Chrome or anything, so I cannot be sure what they are thinking. People I talked had the same feeling, though.