HN to Chrome OS: “you can’t run Skype” | Hacker News Reader

HN to Chrome OS: “you can’t run Skype”

teabuzzed.com

12 pointsfjabre21 comments

I think you've missed the point. "Chrome OS can't run Skype" succinctly explains the chief obstacle to such a play.

Regarding the apparently "frightening" lack of discussion about Chrome OS's impact on Microsoft and "the future of the web", what did you expect? Chrome OS is just not that big of a deal.

yet...

I think Google understands its limitation and the users the Chrome OS will be more appropriate for. If you read the questions answered during the demo (check Matt Cutts blog) you will see that they repeatedly emphasized on the fact that chrome OS is built for netbook computer and with users in mind who primarily depends on web applications. That is all they are going to do for 2010 and they made no secret of that.

So if you like PC/Mac games. Chrome OS is not for you. If you use photoshop heavily. Chrome OS is not for you. If you use skype heavily. Chrome OS is not for you.

As a matter of fact if you depend on any applications that needs to be installed on the HD, Chrome OS probably not for you. The key word with Chrome OS is "Web Application". They are very clear about it and they are not trying to hide their intentions.

I like Google's approach in this. I think they are testing the water with netbook market (which is already quite strong at the moment) and after they set themselves up they will jump in to other market.

A good OS (even if it has a Linux kernel and other matured open source projects) takes a long time to be awesome from really good. Google knows that and I think most HN readers realizes that too.

I think google can already smell the future and they know that vast majority of users (if not all) will mostly rely on web applications for their day to day work and its already very true for some of us.

I was just going to comment on that. Who here hasn't been through a dozen or so "next big things" or "Microsoft killers"? Chrome OS is a niche product for niche hardware. In terms of significance, it's probably equivalent to the original Palm OS. Show me some cool hardware that runs it and I might get excited.

Almost everyone here is a software developer; the most important application for your mom is the web browser. For me, any device larger than my mobile phone should be able to compile something. My netbook is full of apps and with XP it runs them pretty well.

On more thing: there just wasn't anything exciting about the Chrome OS launch. We all knew it was going to be a Linux-based OS that only ran a browser. So now it's launched and that's exactly what it is. What is there to be excited about that we didn't get excited about months ago?

My mom likes her Skype :/

But that's because I have one brother in Spain and one traveling through Asia.

She shouts: It's free!

I like to point out that we pay R$ 160,00 for internet access. In a direct comparison, it's free, but its so called costs are embedded as an added-value with all our internet (which she mainly uses for email and recipes).

I have no idea why I typed so much of this personal tale when I was trying to say that as software developers, what matters is solving user's problems and needs, and Chrome OS, or rather a device which can only run web apps, doesn't do this. If all I wanted was a portable web browser I could buy one of the already available netbooks (wait, they do more than that) or use an iPhone (and make phone calls!)

Yeah, yeah, Chrome's browser will be so much awesome that it'll make previously impossible web apps a reality. NOT!

Besides, even if it does, as long as it relies on open standards for web development, there'll always be another device which can do whatever it does, plus more.

Like running Skype.

Actually, my whole family uses Skype. It's a great way to show off the new baby to all the Australian relatives. I guess there's a reason why all the Hacker News posts were about Skype.

What's really missing here is the true point of Chrome OS. It's not supposed to replace anyone's desktop. It's not even really supposed to replace someones perfectly good XP netbook. It's meant to be put on really cheap hardware. Super cheap. Subsidized by Google search referrals cheap. So cheap that you fully accept that it doesn't run skype or anything else.

It is supposed to replace XP netbooks, at least some of them.

I know geeks have trouble with "less is more", particularly when we're talking about computers but, for ordinary mortals, XP is a mixed bag of benefits (running Skype and a thousand other native apps) and costs (running all sorts of malware, and various equally nasty bits of software to keep you safe from the malware).

Anyone normal who's switched to a Mac from Windows, or put the money they would have spent on a netbook on an iPhone touch has made the similar tradeoffs. Less traditional PC apps but better at doing the things they care about.

skype is not a big deal. This thing will probably work great with Google Talk, which is INTEROPERABLE with other xmpp clients running libjingle.

I'll take that over skype.

It's fairly easy to create technology, but it's really hard to change the way people think. "Real" apps on the web have a chicken/egg problem: no one builds them because they assume everyone can install natively. Why is there no "web Skype"? Because Skype assumes that being cross-platform with QT is enough.

What Google is saying is "We envision a future where most of people's daily computer usage can be done entirely online." Not professional image editing, or publishing, or recording an album. But chatting, checking email/wave, taking notes, whipping up a spreadsheet to analyze data, posting to websites for help, reading the news and researching can be done that way.

But WHY? Why would anyone go for Chrome OS instead of a regular old laptop? Because, like me, they're tired of it. They'd be happy to have desktop at home and a laptop at work and a cell phone in their pocket. But how the heck do you get the contact on your cell phone into your work and home computers? Do you install sync software everywhere and sync all the time? You have an idea in the car, but it belongs in the notebook on your desktop at home...how do you manage that, easily, seamlessly? Or, as Google points out, you lose the device. The photo you took with your phone or your webcam is now lost. My GPS doesn't store where I drove and sync with my camera in my phone to associate photos with places, and merging those two and getting them online to send to my family is a huge pain. Because these devices all operate in a mode that is fundamentally local and only incidentally networked. Data syncing is a pain, and it prevents us from buying lots of different devices that are meant for use in all kinds of situations. Sure, the cloud is available on these devices, but it's not the /standard/. Gadgets don't scale, and it's not because of technology, it's because of a barrier in how people think about gadgets.

I didn't get this until I got an Android phone. Suddenly, the whole problem of how I manage email syncing and contact management on my phone wasn't easier...it simply disappeared entirely. I just don't think about it anymore. If I add a contact in my phone, I know it'll be there when I go to dial it from Google Voice at work. It's just not a problem I think about anymore. Well, what if /most/ of my data were like that? We can come close with products like DropBox, which I use and love, but that's not everything...it's about 2GB of my stuff. Chrome OS is about the idea that you can have an extra computer that covers many of your daily usages and tasks, but without any of the overhead of owning a new computer. No antivirus to install (the root partition is read-only), no local or remote backups to make, no data syncing. That is how I see the vision for Chrome OS, and it is not a vision that is going to materialize because source code was released today, or because they sell a netbook with a new OS on it next year. It is a vision that will be realized because people will be tired of having to sync yet another of their dozens of devices (Desktop, laptop, netbook, cell phone, GPS, Camera...) and will realize that life just got quite a bit less complicated when they used a lightweight, cheap netbook with Chrome OS on it.

At least, that's what I think the vision is. I could be completely wrong.

I think "can't run skype" is pointless when their goal is to emphasize web apps. Google talk and Google voice can replace skype through the web.

Now if your argument is "it will not run xyz desktop application", I think you missed the point entirely of what they want to accomplish.

This is like saying Google is the Holy Messiah and all shall drown in his words. Seriously, just because they are Google you think they are going to be able to convince people to switch over to something that doesn't even have local storage??? What if the cloud goes down??? You had your life-saving data in there??? Sorry buddy, you're out of luck.

Even assuming the Google cloud never goes down, how many people would trust their data to Google???

While I do agree that webapps are increasingly popular, I don't think it's going to come to a stage where anything and everything is a webapp.

I was a little puzzled by the nature of the comments as well. A web centric (to put it very mildly) OS should be a boon to the HN set because it emphasizes exactly the kind of applications we usually create while neatly cutting out the desktop space where we don't. The top comment being a complaint about a desktop app that doesn't run seems like an odd miss here somehow.

It is because of our web-centricity that we are so ambivalent about ChromeOS. We're much more aware of how far HTML and Flash can go, in part because those limitations are our opportunities. Web-only may be enough for some consumers - but are those the same consumers that would buy such a device instead of an actual computer?

[Edit] Come to think of it - what's the advantage of ChromeOS over Android?

Web-only may be enough for some consumers - but are those the same consumers that would buy such a device instead of an actual computer?

If it was a good bit cheaper than an actual computer, I'd say yes, exactly the same. It would also be a tempting target for makers of devices like the crunchpad, which basically attempted to implement their own version of such a thing.

A very good point about android though. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to make them interoperate. Its a strange move on Google's part to so adamantly separate them. (Instead of perhaps extending android to do the work of chrome).

Chrome OS will fail, unless we fix the Web. And this is why:

To create an album and save all my pictures I have to login to Flickr. To upload a video I have to login to YouTube. To find out what my friends are doing, I have to login to Facebook. To let everyone know what I'm doing, I have to login to Twitter. To check my emails, I have to login to Gmail. To chat online, I have to login to Meebo. To update my CV I have to login to LinkedIn. To blog I have to login to Wordpress. To listen to music I have to login to Last.fm. To write a comment, I have to login to Hacker News...

Hey Google, my mom and my dad are to old to remember 20 different passwords.

First, we need to solve the authentication problem. And I'm not talking about OAuth, that's a scam. It's insecure and the concept is flawed.

We are not ready for Chrome OS yet.

All Google services continue to work perfectly on traditional desktop operating systems which makes Chrome OS irrelevant right now. The big potential game changer for Google is the day they decide to launch some amazing new service that only works on Android & Chrome OS. The fact they are building the infrastructure for it suggests either they intend to offer exclusive Google services to Android/Chrome OS users or, more innocently, they want to ensure that, regardless of what their competition does on the platform side, they can still deliver their services via their own platforms.

Google has said that whenever people use the web, they make money. They're behaviour so far (Open Source browsers, deals with Firefox, apps for iPhone) suggests they have no real need or desire to lock people into their client software, when they can lock people into their server software which they access from any modern browser, on a phone or a PC.

Skype keep on crashing just when the connection begins. I run Chrome and Mozilla. I turned off Adaware and than seemed to help. Suggestions anyone?

kudos to the first programmer to come up with a local console so i we can emacs -nw, vim, and a shell with google-chrome in ~/.xinitrc

I'm hoping more for a decent editor in the browser. Firefox has that editor, but its really buggy last time I tried to use it.

I like the idea of having an editor running so wherever I have internet I can code w/e pops into my head. I know you can do this with screen and ssh but I don't have access to those(atm).

Fuck that -- I don't want to fiddle with the native operating system at all, otherwise I'd be running a normal Linux distribution.

What I do want is usermode Linux running as a NaCL app, with its filesystem blob synced automatically to the cloud.

I want good local NaCL ports of urxvt+openssh, tightvnc, and rdesktop.

I want interactive NaCL plugins that can replace any <textarea> with ports of Vim, Emacs, and SciTE while providing rich APIs to the DOM.

If any of this gets any traction, people will write web-interactive NaCL editors and catalogers for photos, audio, and video.

You'll be able to run Skype as soon as they bother to port it to NaCL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com