
Chrome OS: Internet Failing At PC  PC Failing At Internet - alexandros
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/chromeos-announcement.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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grourk
"...five ChromeOS portables are five caches for the same cloud-based user and
application data..."

I think this is the real killer-app here: having all of your data (documents,
pictures, music, movies, etc.) in ONE place accessible from ALL your devices,
and impervious to failure of those devices.

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crs
Haven't we been here before. In 1996 or so both sun and oracle were hyping
network pc's. That's seems to be no different than now except we have re-
branded this client/server architecture "cloud computing".

I seem to recall a video where (i think ellison) was describing how your
desktop would follow you no matter what pc you were sitting in front of. That
is the same theme that Google had yesterday during there presentation.

As a sw engineer at one of the worlds largest aerospace and defense
contractors we don't store much locally on our pc's. Our source is in SCM
systems, the same with bug tracking and change requests. Most of our documents
are on SANS to improve collaboration and sharing. So I guess i'm just not
seeing something "entirely new" here.

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wmf
No, I don't think we have been here before. In 1996 people didn't have
broadband and there was no equivalent of today's Web 2.0 apps (demos don't
count IMO).

But considering that Chrome OS is basically a subset of Chrome running on a
real OS, I agree that there's nothing really new.

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SamAtt
Also, people seem to be forgetting the cache. HTML 5 apps and Google Gears
apps cache data locally and Google made a point of saying the data "will sync"
constantly. Network PCs (at least the one I saw from Oracle) didn't have local
storage at all.

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nathanwdavis
The question of whether regular (non geek) consumers will just see a ChromeOS
portable as a less capable netbook I think is not even a valid question. I
don't know of a single 'regular' consumer who owns a Netbook and very few that
even know what it might be.

So to a consumer, I think ChromeOS will be seen as something completely new.

