

HN to Chrome OS: “you can’t run Skype” - fjabre
http://www.teabuzzed.com/2009/11/hn-to-chrome-os-you-cant-run-skype/

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qeorge
I think you've missed the point. "Chrome OS can't run Skype" succinctly
explains the chief obstacle to such a play.

Regarding the apparently "frightening" lack of discussion about Chrome OS's
impact on Microsoft and "the future of the web", what did you expect? Chrome
OS is just not that big of a deal.

~~~
wvenable
I was just going to comment on that. Who here hasn't been through a dozen or
so "next big things" or "Microsoft killers"? Chrome OS is a niche product for
niche hardware. In terms of significance, it's probably equivalent to the
original Palm OS. Show me some cool hardware that runs it and I might get
excited.

Almost everyone here is a software developer; the most important application
for _your mom_ is the web browser. For me, any device larger than my mobile
phone should be able to compile something. My netbook is full of apps and with
XP it runs them pretty well.

On more thing: there just wasn't anything exciting about the Chrome OS launch.
We all knew it was going to be a Linux-based OS that only ran a browser. So
now it's launched and that's exactly what it is. What is there to be excited
about that we didn't get excited about months ago?

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inerte
My mom likes her Skype :/

But that's because I have one brother in Spain and one traveling through Asia.

She shouts: It's free!

I like to point out that we pay R$ 160,00 for internet access. In a direct
comparison, it's free, but its so called costs are embedded as an added-value
with all our internet (which she mainly uses for email and recipes).

I have no idea why I typed so much of this personal tale when I was trying to
say that as software developers, what matters is solving user's problems and
needs, and Chrome OS, or rather a device which can only run web apps, doesn't
do this. If all I wanted was a portable web browser I could buy one of the
already available netbooks (wait, they do more than that) or use an iPhone
(and make phone calls!)

Yeah, yeah, Chrome's browser will be so much awesome that it'll make
previously impossible web apps a reality. NOT!

Besides, even if it does, as long as it relies on open standards for web
development, there'll always be another device which can do whatever it does,
plus more.

Like running Skype.

~~~
wvenable
Actually, my whole family uses Skype. It's a great way to show off the new
baby to all the Australian relatives. I guess there's a reason why all the
Hacker News posts were about Skype.

What's really missing here is the true point of Chrome OS. It's not supposed
to replace anyone's desktop. It's not even really supposed to replace someones
perfectly good XP netbook. It's meant to be put on really cheap hardware.
Super cheap. Subsidized by Google search referrals cheap. So cheap that you
fully accept that it doesn't run skype or anything else.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It _is_ supposed to replace XP netbooks, at least some of them.

I know geeks have trouble with "less is more", particularly when we're talking
about computers but, for ordinary mortals, XP is a mixed bag of benefits
(running Skype and a thousand other native apps) and costs (running all sorts
of malware, and various equally nasty bits of software to keep you safe from
the malware).

Anyone normal who's switched to a Mac from Windows, or put the money they
would have spent on a netbook on an iPhone touch has made the similar
tradeoffs. Less traditional PC apps but better at doing the things they care
about.

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rpdillon
It's fairly easy to create technology, but it's really hard to change the way
people think. "Real" apps on the web have a chicken/egg problem: no one builds
them because they assume everyone can install natively. Why is there no "web
Skype"? Because Skype assumes that being cross-platform with QT is enough.

What Google is saying is "We envision a future where most of people's daily
computer usage can be done entirely online." Not professional image editing,
or publishing, or recording an album. But chatting, checking email/wave,
taking notes, whipping up a spreadsheet to analyze data, posting to websites
for help, reading the news and researching can be done that way.

But WHY? Why would _anyone_ go for Chrome OS instead of a regular old laptop?
Because, like me, they're tired of it. They'd be happy to have desktop at home
and a laptop at work and a cell phone in their pocket. But how the heck do you
get the contact on your cell phone into your work and home computers? Do you
install sync software everywhere and sync all the time? You have an idea in
the car, but it belongs in the notebook on your desktop at home...how do you
manage that, easily, seamlessly? Or, as Google points out, you lose the
device. The photo you took with your phone or your webcam is now lost. My GPS
doesn't store where I drove and sync with my camera in my phone to associate
photos with places, and merging those two and getting them online to send to
my family is a huge pain. Because these devices all operate in a mode that is
fundamentally local and only incidentally networked. Data syncing is a pain,
and it prevents us from buying lots of different devices that are meant for
use in all kinds of situations. Sure, the cloud is available on these devices,
but it's not the /standard/. Gadgets don't scale, and it's not because of
technology, it's because of a barrier in how people think about gadgets.

I didn't get this until I got an Android phone. Suddenly, the whole problem of
how I manage email syncing and contact management on my phone wasn't
easier...it simply disappeared entirely. I just don't think about it anymore.
If I add a contact in my phone, I know it'll be there when I go to dial it
from Google Voice at work. It's just not a problem I think about anymore.
Well, what if /most/ of my data were like that? We can come close with
products like DropBox, which I use and love, but that's not everything...it's
about 2GB of my stuff. Chrome OS is about the idea that you can have an extra
computer that covers many of your daily usages and tasks, but without any of
the overhead of owning a new computer. No antivirus to install (the root
partition is read-only), no local or remote backups to make, no data syncing.
That is how I see the vision for Chrome OS, and it is not a vision that is
going to materialize because source code was released today, or because they
sell a netbook with a new OS on it next year. It is a vision that will be
realized because people will be tired of having to sync yet another of their
dozens of devices (Desktop, laptop, netbook, cell phone, GPS, Camera...) and
will realize that life just got quite a bit less complicated when they used a
lightweight, cheap netbook with Chrome OS on it.

At least, that's what I think the vision is. I could be completely wrong.

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nkassis
I think "can't run skype" is pointless when their goal is to emphasize web
apps. Google talk and Google voice can replace skype through the web.

Now if your argument is "it will not run xyz desktop application", I think you
missed the point entirely of what they want to accomplish.

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chaosprophet
This is like saying Google is the Holy Messiah and all shall drown in his
words. Seriously, just because they are Google you think they are going to be
able to convince people to switch over to something that doesn't even have
local storage??? What if the cloud goes down??? You had your life-saving data
in there??? Sorry buddy, you're out of luck.

Even assuming the Google cloud never goes down, how many people would trust
their data to Google???

While I do agree that webapps are increasingly popular, I don't think it's
going to come to a stage where anything and everything is a webapp.

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noonespecial
I was a little puzzled by the nature of the comments as well. A web centric
(to put it very mildly) OS should be a boon to the HN set because it
emphasizes exactly the kind of applications we usually create while neatly
cutting out the desktop space where we don't. The top comment being a
complaint about a desktop app that doesn't run seems like an odd miss here
somehow.

~~~
shib71
It is because of our web-centricity that we are so ambivalent about ChromeOS.
We're much more aware of how far HTML and Flash can go, in part because those
limitations are our opportunities. Web-only may be enough for some consumers -
but are those the same consumers that would buy such a device instead of an
actual computer?

[Edit] Come to think of it - what's the advantage of ChromeOS over Android?

~~~
noonespecial
_Web-only may be enough for some consumers - but are those the same consumers
that would buy such a device instead of an actual computer?_

If it was a good bit cheaper than an actual computer, I'd say yes, exactly the
same. It would also be a tempting target for makers of devices like the
crunchpad, which basically attempted to implement their own version of such a
thing.

A very good point about android though. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard
to make them interoperate. Its a strange move on Google's part to so adamantly
separate them. (Instead of perhaps extending android to do the work of
chrome).

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pyman
Chrome OS will fail, unless we fix the Web. And this is why:

To create an album and save all my pictures I have to login to Flickr. To
upload a video I have to login to YouTube. To find out what my friends are
doing, I have to login to Facebook. To let everyone know what I'm doing, I
have to login to Twitter. To check my emails, I have to login to Gmail. To
chat online, I have to login to Meebo. To update my CV I have to login to
LinkedIn. To blog I have to login to Wordpress. To listen to music I have to
login to Last.fm. To write a comment, I have to login to Hacker News...

Hey Google, my mom and my dad are to old to remember 20 different passwords.

First, we need to solve the authentication problem. And I'm not talking about
OAuth, that's a scam. It's insecure and the concept is flawed.

We are not ready for Chrome OS yet.

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jsz0
All Google services continue to work perfectly on traditional desktop
operating systems which makes Chrome OS irrelevant right now. The big
potential game changer for Google is the day they decide to launch some
amazing new service that only works on Android & Chrome OS. The fact they are
building the infrastructure for it suggests either they intend to offer
exclusive Google services to Android/Chrome OS users or, more innocently, they
want to ensure that, regardless of what their competition does on the platform
side, they can still deliver their services via their own platforms.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Google has said that whenever people use the web, they make money. They're
behaviour so far (Open Source browsers, deals with Firefox, apps for iPhone)
suggests they have no real need or desire to lock people into their client
software, when they can lock people into their server software which they
access from any modern browser, on a phone or a PC.

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stanycom
Skype keep on crashing just when the connection begins. I run Chrome and
Mozilla. I turned off Adaware and than seemed to help. Suggestions anyone?

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carmen
kudos to the first programmer to come up with a local console so i we can
emacs -nw, vim, and a shell with google-chrome in ~/.xinitrc

~~~
peregrine
I'm hoping more for a decent editor in the browser. Firefox has that editor,
but its really buggy last time I tried to use it.

I like the idea of having an editor running so wherever I have internet I can
code w/e pops into my head. I know you can do this with screen and ssh but I
don't have access to those(atm).

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blasdel
You'll be able to run Skype as soon as they bother to port it to NaCL.

