Fake Steve Jobs on Chrome OS

Chrome is my default browser at work where I run windows.

The toilet paper comment made me laugh hard though.

only thing lacking chrome is the plugin support and support for RSS feeds. come on! google, that should have been there from day one!

I'll just assume the whole SF thing applies to you too on that one. Just like most people don't give a shit about what OS they use, most people don't really care about browsers either.

I have never had issues with Firefox, I don't care one bit about Javascript speed and honestly Chrome is underfeatured to the point where I think I'm using NCSA Mosaic. I gave it a shot. I was back to Firefox before lunch.

I see there is a hype there, but I just don't get it. The post is clearly hyperbole and overly sarcastic, but to me and stuff which matters to me, Chrome actually is shit. I'm not buying it, even though it's free. I might even go for MSIE before Chrome.

For the same reason, a OS where Chrome is the only browser* would be 100% DOA on my hardware.

* Rumour has it that Google wants to ditch X. If that is the case, no other GUIed *nix software will run without a rewrite.

Interesting that Mozilla spent years to make nice add-ons support, so Chrome will be there only after ~2 years of work, but Mozilla will be far ahead in that time.

Chrome has become my default browser, second place is Firefox. and i've seen increase in chrome share in my site, up from 3% to 7% for the past 6 months.

hey Fake Steve Jobs, I use Chrome too :(

The joke is that Steve calls everything shit. Even things that are useful, usable and exceed the quality bar for most shipping software.

As with Steve's other notable traits, Lyons exaggerates it for humor.

Exactly. If you don't let the style distract you, Fake Steve is actually the most sensible and sharp tech journalism around. This is the first non-hyperbole analysis of Google's announcement I've seen today.

My bet is that Chrome OS will have similar impact to the Chrome browser - encourage everyone to step up their game, but not dominate the market. Google has a lot of money and a lot of bright people, and it acts just like a bright person with little financial concerns: It toys with a lot of ideas, many of them brilliant, but rarely bothers to execute them fully. An OS takes years of frustrating, boring work to mature, I doubt Google has the focus for that.

The joke is to portray Steve Jobs as someone who doesn't respect Adsense as a product.

I seriously doubt Google will be charging any money for Chrome.

Microsoft ran afoul of anti-monopoly legislation. Google (a) do not have a monopoly of the desktop OS market and (b) Chrome OS will be open source, so people would be able to legally distribute Chrome OS without a browser (or more likely, a different rendering engine).

i don't think anyone will force them to if they say that their OS is a browser.

They will only get into trouble if they manage to pick up any sort of significant market share.

If the Google browser is a flop no one will care less.

I liked Fake Steve Jobs when it first came out, some of it was really harsh but funny. But I was always slightly perturbed by the "freetard" stuff which seemed out of place for a Steve Jobs parody, and whenever they came up a strangely pro-micrsoft stance appeared too. When I found out that those bits where the opinions of the real author (Dan Lyons) leaking through I found that ruined it somewhat for me.

"Hate" would be too strong, but I thought it was a stupid article. What Google is releasing seems to be a Linux kernel with a new window manager running Chrome. I don't think that's nearly as difficult as he makes out.

He's right that the netbook market is tiny, but it's also poorly served by existing operating systems, so it might be a reasonable place to start. And it certainly makes sense for Google to make using webapps easier, because their core business is based on all that traffic.

Anyhow, the article felt to me like it was trying too hard -- lots of hyperbole but few ideas.

It uses cheap humor to badly comunicate its point, however valid it may be. So although i agree with some of the points, its my believe that at least on HN sending your message in a non trollish and reasonable(and yes, boring for a 14 year-old) way, is just as important as being rational and intelligent. Im a cynical jerk myself most of the time, but i avoid sharing my spicy personality on HN, because i KNOW that it gets in the way of good conversation, even though i don't take myself seriously(and i know the author doesn't either). See, a lot of the comments(including my two) on the submission are not about his points, but about his controversial delivery, and THAT is not good for HN.

The biggest point in my mind:

"You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really?"

Aside from the stat-based argument (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=694756): I've been repeatedly surprised by the non-technical people around me who are on Chrome. My girlfriend downloaded it literally the day it came out, when I had read just a blog post or two about it. My parents, various friends' parents, the list just goes on and on, and none of them are nerds. It's startling how effortlessly Chrome has permeated public consciousness.

I don't hate the article, but I think fake steve jobs has jumped the shark.

Valid? This sounds like a bad immitation of linuxhater, at least linuxhater gets his facts right:

"Linux still doesn't run right." BS, his own blog runs on linux.

"Chrome is shit?" BS, Safari copied every single innovation of chrome.

"Nobody uses Chrome?" Lol, chrome is almost beating Safari already.

"Netbook sucks." Who cares, Chrome will start up on netbooks and go all the way up to desktops. They have to start somewhere and starting on a niche such as netbook is a good idea.

"Operatin system are hard to build." The GCOS is based on linux, 19 year old now, not to mention the gcc and glibc so almost 30 year old. And chrome already rocks.

I would have agreed with you once, but I changed my mind since Google started advertising Chrome like crazy. You can hardly use a Google service these days without having Chrome suggested to you somewhere prominently. It seems like Google is really pushing Chrome to the mainstream. Whatever their reasons, they really do want to capture a significant portion of the market for it.

It was written so that the reader can take any given point and either embrace it as brilliant insight or disregard it as satirical Fake Steve humor.

I mean, the end of the piece entirely contradicts the earlier points... If Chrome OS is pointless and ineffectual -- occupying market niches that Apple isn't even interested in -- why should Fake Steve feel so threatened by it?

(BTW, he claims the 39 million netbook figure in the article is for the next four years, not next year, implying that the netbook market is minuscule compared to desktops, laptops, and phones.)

Eyeballs. Couple that with data mining and targeted ads and you end up with something that doesn't really fall outside Google's tried-and-true business model.

By driving more eyeballs to the web and away from desktop apps.

I guess maybe

1)helping encourage widespread html 5 and better javascript support so more people can run google apps

2) deals with hardware vendors

I know that I'm probably wrong.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are neeeerdddssss, not business school kids that decided to make a web app.

There is a good chance that they're doing this just because it's really really cool, and because they can. I imagine that if I ever had the sort of cash that they have, I would be doing the same thing that I do on the weekends NOW, but on a larger scale: geekery.

Building a linux distro is geekery of the highest order. Good for them. Google makes billions and billions of dollars from their other projects. This is one that they can figure out later. :). (or I can figure it out for them now: adsense, lots of it.)

I understand that google is a publicly traded company; they have shareholders to answer to, but I imagine that all they have to do is point at their earnings and go "trust us, guys...trust us".

If anything, this will drive more traffic to their moneymakers.

If you own the whole internet, as they would, surely there should be a way or another to make some money?

The goal is not to make money from the OS. IT was discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693861

Disclaimer: my submission and my blogpost.

1. Google owns the internet; search makes money, e-mail makes money, reader makes money, any website that uses AdSense makes money.

2. If there is more internet usage, Google makes more money.

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Additionally, Google has a bunch of cool things that it wants to do but it can't because Javascript is a gimp piece of junk at the moment.

The more power Google gets, the harder it can push for its features.

If they let Apple and Microsoft control how people connect to the internet one day they might see themselves superseded. This is a first move into making linux more acceptable to the consumer and maybe keeping the desktop the way they want it.

No adblock

Simple: the more time people spend online, the more money Google makes off adsense, which is the vast majority of their profit.

Google can get some eyeballs out of the effort by having more Google-apps users so this effort be somewhat self-supporting but more importantly, it serves Google's strategic goals.

Keep in mind that with the web constantly growing and constantly improving, Google doesn't need a new business model - being the entrance to the greatest show on earth will work for a long time now. Google today mostly needs to fend off outside monopolists who would aim to seize the whole thing by taking control of one or another choke-points. And having an OS to challenge MS is important here - even if the OS only takes minority share, keeping MS honest is important. Moreover, if all those other companies don't make monopoly profits, they won't have extra cash to throw at Google.

To get to a Google prompt, a user needs: 1) A PC 2) An operating system 3) A web browser 4) An Internet Connection from an ISP

The OS can potentially control search engine choice. Ditto with the browser and the ISP. Notice that Google has challenged monopolistic behavior in steps 2-4 by now (wireless venture, Chrome, Chrome OS). PC architecture is already mostly open so Google doesn't have to do anything there - but Google does build PCs!

Its a little funny, but completely tasteless.

Maybe one is not enlightened enough to fully understand its brilliance?

"Ours started out 20 years ago, at NeXT. You could say it goes back to 1977, with the BSD guys. Heck, you could even say it goes back to 1969 with Dennis Thompson and Lionel Ritchie."

he probably means as a desktop OS. UI for a complex system like the OS is incredibly hard to nail