the onda

I've not downloaded or attempted the early release of Chrome OS yet, but having read through the docs, I can't help but feel that Google attempting to launch two post-PC operating systems at the same time is only going to confuse partners, consumers, and even developers.

Unless Google gets into the hardware business, it's going to have to depend on large OEMs to ship Chrome OS preinstalled. These are the same folks that took their limited software resources (because even though you might ship billions of dollars of hardware, the razor thin margins mean that you just don't have that much money for software R&D) and bet "big" on Android for everything from phones to slates to netbooks. Now two years later along comes Google saying "Whoops, we didn't really mean that we were excited about you using Android, instead check out this shiny happy new toy!" That one is gonna sting.

Also, no matter how many cute videos Google puts out, consumers are going to be really confused by Chrome OS. Will it have an AppStore? Will it run iTunes? Can it see the shared printer? Share files with the other machines on the network? The smartphone doesn't have any of these affordances (it is, after all, the grandchild of the telephone) so it doesn't disappoint in the same way. And what of the connection to Chrome the browser? The first time someone sees a netbook that runs both Chrome the browser (a fantastic product) and iTunes and then makes the mistake of buying the "webtop only" Chrome OS version, I suspect the Google brand will suffer. Repeat a million times and Google may have to start worrying about its unassailable brand in search.

Finally, developers. The story here is simpler, but not obvious by any means. Chrome OS runs Chrome the browser which means that we're talking about HTML5 applications. But what if we want access to the camera on the bezel (and not through the flash plug-in)? Will the DOM API be extended? Supposedly this is how developers will get access to really important things like the power meter. So now we've got to test for a series of DOM elements that may or may not be present across Chrome runtimes? When you're talking about tens of millions of Chrome the browser instances, do we really want to do this? And the alternative, which is changing Chrome the browser to behave like Chrome the OS from an API perspective seems like a mistake in a world where Firefox, Safari, and IE are still relevant.

So I don't get it. To me it seems like a great example of the netbook distortion effect (NDE): netbooks are so cool looking to fans of Star Trek, Batman, and 24, that they completely obscure their essence as cheap laptops for those that can't afford better and paperweight toys for the rest of us. Meanwhile some IDC clown put out numbers saying that a gazillion netbooks will be sold and boom! You've got folks at Google scheming to kill Windows on this new dark horse.

Sort of like the guys with the cornseed engine for this new killer car called the Edsel.