Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Among all the idiocy printed today about Chrome OS

...finally, the voice of reason! Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... fake Steve Jobs!

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and-get-some.html

8 comments:

DzembuGaijin said...

Well, Chrome OS only makes sense. People spend so much more time on web these days, a good couch surfing device is in order.

Apple keep silence about making one.

Microsoft can not deliver one.

Other may come close :

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/crunchpad-the-launch-prototype/

Google have chance to make it usable. They talk to OEM. This is important.

I would immediately buy a "oversized iPhone" - but like really big, with at least 8 hours of battery life, if all it will provide will be Secure and fast and FC Web browsing.

Making OS is trivial: I did it with a very small team. I told this story million times. Linux kernel with networking and VLC libraries plus Firefox or Chrome ( with Gears) and some h/w and configuration UI plus "nice collection of shortcuts" is not a very hard task. If I could develop Pingo RIP Server, Google can 100% deliver even better distro. If you remember , Pingo took 1 minute 30 seconds to install from slow CD Rom drive and restart time was under 5 seconds: so fast users never realized when watch dog had to do it.

So if Google will manage a good project Execution and will work with OEM, we may have a nice product.

DzembuGaijin said...

Talking about idiocy

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/well-played-microsoft-no-seriously.html

It is VERY HARD to top that :-) Really :-)

Sergey Solyanik said...

> I would immediately buy a "oversized iPhone"

Yes, you and another 1-2M people who bought Android. It's a tiny market.

I've experimented enough with devices. The key difference between a PC and a device is that with a PC, you will ALWAYS figure out how to solve a problem. It may be hard, but the solution does exist.

With the devices, if it's not been designed to do X, it won't, no matter how you try.

Media playback is the best example. There are a bunch of devices that are designed to stream media over the network. I am sure you have about 10 of these already. The problem is, an OEM stops providing upgrades at some point, a new media file format/bitrate/codec comes out, and now you're a happy owner of a door stopper.

Been there, done that.

Today all my (non-portable) media playback devices are PCs, have been for the last 5 years, and they WORK. They can - and do - play content from Amazon, Netflix, DVDs, Blurays, HD-DVDs, podcasts of every conceivable encoding, ... Configuration is trivial, and at roughly $400/PC (including nice HTC cases), they are not exactly breaking the bank.

The same reasoning goes for pretty much any file format - office documents, HTML, whatever. A PC will alwasy be able to handle data, a device - not so much.

So no, I am not lining up to buy this thing. Sorry.

DzembuGaijin said...

Exactly!

When appliance is actually a standard computer, under OS developed and maintained by Big company :) for FREE.

Like... what not to like? Lightweighted OS? Best Web browser? Low price?

They partner with Adobe, so all "formats" will be handled.

Sorry ... probably not Silverlight ...

And I am kind of happy it will not run ActiveX either ...

You know...

Hope they will make it fast and safe for kids to use :-)

NS said...

"The key difference between a PC and a device is that with a PC, you will ALWAYS figure out how to solve a problem."

This misses the point. For a lot of people, iBook solves all computer-related problems they have or expect to have in their lifetime. Same for netbook.

By way of an example - when was the last time you customized your cars front suspension?

Sergey Solyanik said...

Dzembu --

Ok, here we have our first limitation. No Silverlight == no Netflix. Oops.

NS --

I don't think this is generally true. If this were the case, AAPL would have a much bigger share of the market, wouldn't it? Yet in the Windows' darkest days, in the middle of the Vista disaster, it rose from 6 to 9%... and that was it.

NS said...

"I don't think this is generally true. If this were the case, AAPL would have a much bigger share of the market, wouldn't it? "

That would be a valid point if we were looking at an unpenetrated market. As it stands, 9% isn't bad.

Actually, I think it makes my point - it is possible to create an open source based appliance that fits the needs of 9% of the computer users well enough they tolerate dealing with Apple.

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