Someone recently asked me what I thought about the Google ChromeOS announcement. I think a lot of things about it, but this article sums them up extremely well, and adds several more that I hadn’t considered too.
The bottom line: like the Chrome browser, I don’t see it as necessary. Neither will put much added pressure on Microsoft; both will likely take more users from the non-Microsoft alternatives that already exist (Apple’s OS X, Linux, Firefox, and Opera), rather than from Microsoft itself.
That said, more competition is always good for the consumer. This should push the Linux developers to improve the Linux experience faster, if nothing else.
(Hm… here’s another take on it. It seems overly cynical, but it might just have some truth to it.)
That second article is inaccurate about Android, it said a plus of Android vs. ChromeOS is that it uses interpreted programs “attractive to developers”. Untrue, Android uses programs written in Java, which is compiled, albeit to pseudo-code, which means it doesn’t have the alleged advantage of interpreted debugging cycles as he claims. ChromeOS on the other hand, is said to run “WebApps” which are interpreted; so he got things backwards.
That having been said, I’m sort of old-school when it comes to operating systems. Give me something Unixy that runs C or something like it with object-oriented extensions (like Obj-C or C++) and I’m a happy camper. Java and JavaScript don’t do it for me as the chief way to program an OS; though JavaScript is actually, unlike Java, a nice scripting language when you separate it from the DOM.
(As you know, the only reason why it has “Java” in the name was marketing – originally Netscape called it LiveScript or something like that. It really has more in common with something like Ruby, it’s object-oriented with stuff like closures that’s fun to play with, and like Ruby (and Obj-C) it has Smalltalk heritage, via the language Self developed by Sun as an attempt to make an OOP language even more OOP in spirit than SmallTalk. (Prototype-based object orientation.) It’s surprising that it’s a nice language considering the amount of webpage-abuse JavaScript is used for online. 🙂 Until recently also JavaScript was very slow, but next-generation browsers like Chrome, Safari 4, and Firefox 3.5 make it faster with JIT compilation and other tricks.)
OBTW, Fake Steve Jobs’ article on ChromeOS is hilarious.
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and-get-some.html