Is Chrome OS the future of home computing?
Google announced its Chrome OS last week, and it’s focused on the cloud. You basically get a browser and web-based applications to replace all the stuff you love. In fact, the OS is so cloud-focused it even resets itself on errors by downloading itself.
Let’s discount the availability of Internet everywhere. Look beyond the fact Google Gears is still flaky and doesn’t work seamlessly with Google’s own products, GMail and Google Calendar. These things can and will get better.
Google’s strategy is to sync everything to the cloud and assume its accessibility everywhere: your laptop at home, your desktop at work, your Android phone, and now, your netbook (or other coming device). The cloud is actually Google’s servers, though, which means your data is on Google’s servers.
Compare this to Apple’s 2001 vision of the home Macintosh being a hub for your digital life. At the time, that meant your digital camera, music player, and video camera. The Mac was meant to aggregate all of this and give it back to you. It was a successful vision: now, the Mac manages your iPhone, your iPad, and yes, your music and video content.
Microsoft is on this side as well, but they’re following a weird disjointed path. Windows 7 is great, but they still haven’t nailed down what they want to be the hub of your digital life. Is it the PC? The XBox? The Zune? Windows Mobile? They do all these things but haven’t made them work together.
You don’t need everything synced to a cloud: music, email, and calendar are good examples of things in the cloud. You do need some things local, though, as either primary storage (video, photos) or for access when offline. You also need some things to stay on a local device and sync, like your contacts.
Apple has figured this out – that’s why they called it a digital media hub.
Microsoft is close – instead of competing with Apple on a product-by-product basis, I’d argue they should do the following:
- allow XBox360 to store your music and videos locally
- allow synching for Windows Mobile with PC, and tie PC into XBox (or make it your local hub)
- tie Zune into this infrastructure
Google and its Chrome OS, meanwhile, are a different path. I can see why techpeople love it – it simplifies life considerably if you keep everything in the cloud and access it from a browser. But most people are not like us.
Software doesn’t always win the day, especially when you’re dealing with normal people. A good user experience does. That’s why the iPhone has been so wildly successful – it took the complexity of a smartphone and made it easy. The same is true for the Mac – it doesn’t have the most software, but the experience is very good.
Google is trying to sidestep the software and user experience issue by betting that the browser is good enough. The problem is that normal people don’t want a browser as their OS – they want an experience.