I don’t see chrome OS suceeding. Google is making the same mistake we have seen others make in the open source world.
The main complaint I have is that it stinks of NIH. From the google blogpost
“And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates”And a bit later on
“The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel”Now the first statement makes me wonder what is it that they are doing which is so special. At least on the LKML I have not seen any discussion on the redesign of the security features we have. And just the idea that the OS would be able to protect the user from malware is absurd. It puts unnecessary pressure on the developers and promotes unsafe user behavior (the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that google wants all our private information so unsafe behavior is good for them).
The second statement makes me wonder. What is it that the current windowing systems do NOT provide. There are tons of them out there. Why is it so hard to take one of them and modify it and contribute BACK to the community. And what is it so special that google engineers can do that open source developers cannot do.
This leads me to the reasons why I believe chrome os will fail. I have some idea of what happens in the open source community. They hate being given a big chunk of code and then expected to maintain it. And IF google expects they will start a project which does something similar to something out there already and expect open source developers to flock there just because Google started it, they are mistaken.
Unless Google expects to spend a lot of money on chrome os to maintain it, the project is going to die. And guess where the money is going to come from. I am not sure (that) the shareholders would be very happy with Google spending a lot of money on basically free software. And more importantly, one that can be exploited by another vendor to undermine Google’s presence.
And LJ shows another very interesting perspective of it here. Tell me Google, what is it that you are doing which is new?
1 response so far ↓
1 comet // Jul 21, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I think Google might just be planning to leverage on the projected success of their Android OS, and capture the netbook market with Chrome. A lot of synergy can be promised with a single OS on both my smartphone and my netbook (if I were to possess both, for some reason).
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