You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that more and more of our life and work is happening online — online bill paying and banking, online socializing and networking, online radio and TV, online applications like Google docs. All within a Web browser, I can edit videos — my own or someone else’s, create and manage a database, find my buddies using GPS, store and share files, collaborate with a project team, manage my calendar, create fine art, do complex math functions, and make new friends or reconnect with old ones. (In fact, many of those items I can do with an iPhone or Android phone.) There’s even a new shopping site that’ll remind me when it’s time to reorder toity paper.
Earlier this week, Google announced a new operating system, Chrome OS, which will be available next year for netbooks and other smaller devices. I’m oversimplifying, but here’s the essence: since you use the browser for everything anyway, why not architect the browser as the central component of the OS and push other lesser-used things to the side?
I’m sure the news of Google’s OS foray is a blow to the good folks at gOS, whose Cloud browser for netbooks was announced last December. If you missed that announcement, so did I.
Of course, Microsoft tried this years ago, and they woulda got away with it too — if it weren’t for those meddling kids at the DOJ and the EU.
And let’s go back even further. In the mid-90s and early 2000s, I recall a bunch of discussions of how the Internet was going to kill the desktop. In early discussions, people applied terms they knew: it was first called terminal computing until people remembered the leftover stigma that term carried with it from the 80s; then later called cloud computing or software as a service (SAAS) or Application Service Providers (ASPs), and now commonly called Web apps.
Obviously, it’s a slow change process — dependent on Web browser technology, network speed, and the pace of human behavioral change. I think we’re (slowly) turning a corner here, and the things some of us have been discussing for a decade might be finally maturing.
