Google Predicts Rise of Web OS in 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Google Predicts Rise of Web OS in 2011

gigaom.com

21 pointslotusleaf198730 comments

It's funny to me that Web OS is being heralded as 'the thing for the future' when all we've really done is reinvent the terminal.

Everything old is new again.

So much in our industry is about iterative improvement rather than radical new invention.

Terminals did not have:

* a client-side data structure (the DOM) and rendering engine that can be manipulated by a client-side platform-independent language/VM. Modern web applications would not be possible without this.

* a persistence model (cookies) that allows users to behave as if they have a long-lived session with the application, when in fact they are communicating over a stateless protocol and may be getting directed to different servers every time. One instance of the web server can crash; this does not interrupt the session.

* a link structure that allows applications to effortlessly direct users to other applications in a user-friendly way.

* a security model that lets different applications interoperate, allowing them to exchange data, delegate authentication, or embed parts of one application into another.

* an application loading/launching system where a user can type a short string that they saw on the side of a truck into their browsing application and be instantly running an application that is hosted literally anywhere in the world.

We haven't "reinvented" anything, we took an idea that saw limited success due to numerous practical limitations and evolved a better version of it that scales to billions of users and millions of applications.

It's like saying "it's funny to me that going to the moon is being heralded as 'the thing for the future' when all we've really done is reinvent the biplane."

Yes, as the first and only vendor of web-only OSs, Google predicts that the segment will rise. In other news, Microsoft predicts the rise of touch-friendly smartphones that don't render HTML5, and Apple predicts the rise of tablets with a single button on their face. In fact, all of these segments are likely to rise from "some" to "some + some more" in 2011.

Google is only fooling themselves if they think people want to live in a totalitarian computing paradigm. Network computing is obviously the future, but it will be democratized, decentralized, and multi-platform. Google may supply applications for this environment, but they will in no way be the gatekeeper of all our I/O.

You are implying that Google wants people to have a "totalitarian computing paradigm", that they oppose network computing being "democratized, decentralized, and multi-platform", and that they want to be "the gatekeeper of all our I/O". Where in the article exactly do they make these claims?

Google Apps, App Engine, Chrome OS, Chrome Browser and Android is a vertically integrated computing platform where:

* my development is done on AppEngine

* my operating system is replaced with Google's web browser

* my information is stored in Google docs

* my files are on a Google filesystem

* my applications run on Google's infrastructure

* all my phone calls, search, and interactivity is done through my Android smartphone

Google is systematically building an environment where every byte of data I consume will flow through Google's network.

Offering these services != locking you in, or locking competitors out. You can pick all, any or none of them. Competitors can and will offer alternatives.

You can pick all, any or none of them.

No you can't. In ChromeOS you cannot replace the filesystem, native applications, and web browser with non-Google alternatives. This is the exact opposite of an open platform.

Not sure what you quite mean here.

The platform, is the web. Which is completely open - you can install and run any webapp you wish.

I think you're still thinking in the 'old' terms, where computers have local filesystems and native applications. Forget about those, they're just firmware like the BIOS.

Just to be fair his point is valid on the browser (though I agree with you that everything else he said is utterly false). But I'd defend Google on even that. The browser is the core of ChromeOS so I don't think they can allow it to be replaced. But what they can do is make Chrome the most standards compliant browser out there and that's exactly what they've been doing.

So while you are locked into the Chrome browser in ChromeOS you could easily go back to Windows and Mozilla and take anything you created there with you

(not to mention the Chrome browser is built on an open source browser engine)

The platform, is the web. Which is completely open - you can install and run any webapp you wish.

The web is open, agreed. But you're going to have to explain to me how I can read or write a file on a ChromeOS without Google knowing what is read or written.

Then, if Google's infrastructure is required for I/O, please explain how this is not totalitarian computing.

> "But you're going to have to explain to me how I can read or write a file on a ChromeOS without Google knowing what is read or written."

Well you can use HTML5 local storage, cookies, db etc, or you can store stuff on 'the cloud'.

If you don't trust google, then that's another matter.

How do I know that my linksys router isn't tracking everything I do? Because I trust linksys not to do that. Same here. If I buy a ChromeOS device, I'll just have to trust Google aren't going to be evil.

If you don't trust google, then that's another matter.

What do you mean "another" matter? This is "the" matter. In an open computing platform I don't have to "just trust" anybody.

Yes you do, you have to trust the chip makers, the BIOS maker, the network interface card maker, your ISP, your router etc etc

Any one of those could be screwing with you.

you have to trust the chip makers, the BIOS maker, the network interface card maker

So, what you're saying is we might as well just give up, and purposely store all our data on Google's file servers and give up all data and information privacy, because all network chip manufacturers and internet providers are already sniffing all our data?

Note... webOS != Web OS.

Thanks. That was confusing me.

There's not even a half-decent open file system for the web yet. I can store my files on my desktop and open them with any application, put them in Dropbox and open them in any computer. Before you have that (and many, many other things), web applications that are on par with Desktop applications remain a dream. As they have been for the past 15 years.

Files don't make as much sense on the web as on the desktop.

I'm not sure we really need the concept of a 'file system' in the coming web era.

As long as you have the ability to move your data around, eg 'export photos from flickr to facebook', adding some file system only complicates matters.

Right now, I am in a bit of a personal computing utopia. I've maxed out the ram of my 2 year old Macbook and installed an SSD. Now, the only wait I have that's longer than 1 second is for network stuff and most things are instant.

This gets me wondering: what if we made everything orthogonally persistent in the cloud and used the 200 GB of local storage as a cache? There wouldn't be any notion of a hard disk. Instead, I'd have 200GB of persistent RAM (simulated by about 8GB of dynamic RAM, backed by 200GB of MLC Flash) directly synced with the cloud.

I would never have to think about saving anything to disk. I'd just have "My Apps" and "My Data." They'd just always be there, forever. If I ever lost my laptop, so long as I have network, they'd still be there, just everything would run slower for a few days. This is a far cry, even from the Cr-48. Such a machine wouldn't even need to boot. [1] Everything would just always be there. (Apps would have to be rewritten to eliminate the notion of the disk.)

Clearly, we already have the hardware and software to support this. At this point, it's just a matter of putting it all together. This would take some serious engineering, but whoever succeeded would basically be the next Microsoft.

[1] - An easier way to accomplish this would be to maintain a small boot partition, but use the majority of the SSD for 200GB of swap. The kernel would have to be changed so that local swap is treated as a cache for pages stored in the cloud. This prevents us from having to engineer error correction directly in RAM. This would only be a stopgap, however, as eliminating the notion of a hard disk entirely would have significant benefits.

  > If I ever lost my laptop, so long as I have network, they'd still
  > be there, just everything would run slower for a few days.

* It would also always be there for governments and corporations to spy on.

* It would also always be there to some extent even if you tried to delete the data (archived by design or by request of government/corporation).

* It would also make it that much easier for governments/corporations to secretly data-mine everyone's data for suspicion of subversive thoughts

... etc

Those are pretty much the same point - privacy. Which most people aren't too worried about.

And if you're really concerned with this, haven't we generally solved this problem? Pass the information back and forth completely encrypted and only store the key locally. I mean, obviously the problem is far more difficult than that, but there's no reason we can't have data stored "in the cloud", while maintaining some privacy of information.

I suppose what I really should say instead of "we've solved this" is that storing things "in the cloud" doesn't necessarily mean you give up all rights to privacy. There has to be some middle ground here.

The existence of user-visible files is orthogonal to local vs network. Dropbox gives you a network-accessible filesystem, and iOS stores data locally with no visible filesystem.

As long as you have the ability to move your data around, eg 'export photos from flickr to facebook', adding some file system only complicates matters.

I'm not convinced that having to learn how a dozen different websites import and export data is an improvement over having a file that I can do whatever I want with. That seems like a step back to the 90s where every app had a unique format and your options for manipulating and moving data around were limited to what each app explicitly supported.

Some would argue that 'files' will become as archaic as floppy disks.

Calling them 'documents' vs 'files' is a minimal difference. People are usually referring to the document itself when they say 'file,' not the file-in-a-folder-in-a-filesystem paradigm. If you open a spreadsheet in Google Docs, people still will view that as a file.

In reality, most documents today are multi-file archives that hide the complexity from the user anyway. The same goes for applications. The days of managing individual files passed a while ago.

First, to argue that web application need to be "on par" with Desktop applications to replace them is totally false. See The Innovator's Dilemma. In a nutshell existing technologies become too feature rich and complex and exceed market demand. This creates a disruptive opportunity for simpler technologies to replace them in the mainstream by growing upmarket.

When disruptive technologies achieve the minimum required feature set to meet market demand, market competition shifts to other criteria. One case study in the book describes how cable actuated earth movers companies felt save as hydraulic actuated earth movers could never move as much earth and initially had zero commercial applications. They still can't. Yet hydraulic actuated earth movers have almost completely replaced cable driven ones, except at the market edges that require extreme performance, by establishing a foot hold beneath the existing market (ditch diggers) and innovating upwards.

Web applications are simple compared to desktop applications. They are constrained by web standards and run in sandboxed environments. The question is not whether web applications can exceed Desktop applications but whether they can meet market demand.

Software + Services (a term Microsoft created when faced with the Internet Services Disruption) is a hybrid, transitional strategy for desktop application companies that makes sense in partially connected environments. This is the model of Dropbox and every other data replication provider. Over time, perhaps with ubiquitous 4G networks, we'll see how this fares against low maintenance operating systems and zero maintenance web applications.

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