Ian,
I have been expecting something like this for a while, but I actually
expected it out of China or India, to be honest.
Windows 7 is bloody fantastic, IMHO, but the "legacy" issue is something
that is a great boon to corporate customers who have stuck with Microsoft
over the decades. If you have something obsucre, but vital, written for DOS
or any version of Windows, it will probably still work, after a fashion.
And this is true for hardware. If your video is VGA, AGP, PCI, PCI/e, it
will work with Windows. Any architecture, and system, Windows will still
work.
A "new OS" doesn't have to do that. If you target the Netbook market, you
need a USB driver and lots of generic USB device drivers, and that it. No
serial ports, no parallel ports, legacy MIDI systems etc etc
With just a single video driver, a unified sound system, USB networking
drivers (Ethernet and wifi) you can support a whole class of machines.
Then, just fire up the browser.If you need a "file manager", do it in
the browser.
And finally, Gears deals with your offline needs.
Give a member of the public a machine that you press the on button and then
wait one, two seconds and you are online. I can see the advantage of that.
Even Windows 7 will be just starting it's animation, and Chome OS will be on
your homepage.
Such machines would be great for corporations too - a proper thin client.
2009/7/8 Ian Forrester
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html
>
> Ok so what do people think?
>
> For me Google is certainly on a home run at the moment, Wave anyone?
> From reading the link above, it seems like it will be something like I saw
> at Minibar a while back but can't find now. So a boot straight into a
> browser using a small Linux kernel. I was hoping it would be a X11
> environment to compete with Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, etc.
>
> But I do think Google's right. The web is the platform, just like how Palm
> created WebOS. HTML5 is going a large part of the change.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ian Forrester
>
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Brian Butterworth
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