the onda

Chrome is browser is a terrific addition to the Internet operating system. It's put Safari and IE on notice and showed the world what a pig Firefox has become in middle age. Google Chrome OS however, is at best a really dumb idea from a team that wanted to get some of that Android OEM love— or at worst, proof that Google is not immune to the big company-itis that causes successful franchises to start warping reality to better fit their business models (I know, I've been living this!)

I've spent the past few days thinking about what it is that really bothers me about the notion of a stripped down Ubuntu that boots into a super secure browser and here it is: in an era when the access devices are getting more and more powerful, be they smartphones or netbooks (which Intel is supposed to be taking over the multicore threshold soon enough), the notion that we are going to hobble that client side processing for the sake of security or simplicity is just ass backwards.

And the notion that it is being made secure for my mom to use? Gimme a break! This smells like the kind of paternalistic thinking that got us the first rev of the OLPC with its hobbled software and bad assumptions about how stupid most of those peasants were going to be.

Computing is on an unstoppable march towards more and more processing in smaller and smaller devices. The cloud is really interesting for all sorts of synchronization, collaboration, and "living software" reasons, but pushing us all back into the mainframe stone age seems... well like a very unGoogly thing to do.

Love it or hate it, Wave is disruptive. Android is disruptive. Bidding to keep spectrum open is disruptive. Even Chrome the browser and all of the associated HTML5 goodies that Google is spitting out are disruptive.

But locking us out of the real power of portable and affordable computing? Come on.

[As an aside, here is a somewhat related perspective from a former employee— though I think his point applies more to Chrome the browser]