Welcome to your cloud account at Google.
After years of speculation and wet dreams the Nerd world finally got to see the fabled Google Operating System (Chrome OS): a boot loader for a browser. (long video here)
A bit of an anti-climax.
Wired and all the blogs are disappointed – they wanted a razzle-dazzle new OS that would leave Windows 7 and Snow Leopard behind.
That’s not going to happen. Google is first and foremost an Internet company. They live in a “cloud” of servers and web applications. Google doesn’t do old fashioned hardware and applications.
The heralds of the digital age don’t understand that web applications and a cloud based operating system will never offer the same power as desktop computing.
Desktop computing is literally putting “Information AND PROCESSING POWER at your fingertips”. Your data and your CPU belong to you – no stinking net connection needed to “reach it”.
Once we have your data we own you … biatch!
Cloud computing is a step back to how computing was in the old days of Mainframes and Terminals. All the power and data resided in a giant computer the mainframe – and you could “peek” into it by using a dumb and feeble terminal. The terminal itself had no processing power or data storage to speak of – it was just a “window” into the mainframe.
Yesterday’s Terminals are today’s Netbooks, Smartphones and iPhones. Small underpowered devices only meant to “connect” you to small datasets or the “cloud”.
Google, Apple and many other companies want to suck you into THEIR clouds – because once they have your data they won’t give it back so easily.
Services like GMail, Flickrs, Twitter, Google Docs, Apple MobileMe, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft OfficeLive, Adobe’s Acrobat online etc – they all want your data on their clouds.
And they know: once you have a certain amount of “your life” on their server array it’s too much hassle for you to switch.
Because downloading or deleting all those documents, images, videos and links is a time consuming process via the browser – and it is also a “Social Inconvinience”, because all your friends & colleagues have these links and have their “cloud lives” linked to yours.
And you don’t want to disconnect your friends, will you?
Cloud Computing 1.0 – IBM-style …
Microsoft might have annoyed us for years, giving us software and data formats that were less than perfect. But at least we had everything on OUR computers and hard drives.
Once you save something in a “cloud” you have only limited access to it. Internet connections are far from being so reliable like electricity and not everyone has a brutally fast internet connection at home – or on the road. And without (a fast) connection there is no access to your “cloud”.
A backup or transfer of your “cloud life” to your machine or another provider is often cumbersome or even impossible. (so much about open standards)
That is the same strategy how IBM made loads of money till the late 1980’s: the vendor lock in. IBM’s mainframes only ran IBM software – for their customers was no choice and hardly a chance to get out either.
The PC revolution offered hardware and software even mere mortals could afford and operate. Although MS-DOS, Windows nor Apple OS/X are open source, the platforms allowed users to run applications from different vendors. In the case of the Wintel Universe you could buy hardware from any vendor and the Operating System as well as your applications would run. You were not locked into just vendor …
Now we will be equally “chained” to our cloud providers. If they deny us access we are locked out of our own data, email, instant messages, tweets, Facebook profile and our whole online identity – and in the case of the Chrome OS – our own computers – we are fucked! (and you thought loosing your cell phone was bad?!)
You don’t own the cloud – the cloud owns you!
We demand simplicity instead of control over our own data …
I am afraid the great PC revolution is over and many people will welcome the switch to “dumb web 2.0 terminals”, because they are too stupid to manage their own PCs and data.
I can understand them – keeping a system clean and running is a tough job: system updates, driver updates, viruses, malware, hackers, crash recovery, regular backups and their own chaotic file organization.
It’s so much nicer to have Google (or another data centre) taking care of that. You just USE the cloud, you don’t need to keep it intact, install anything or even do a backup.
All done by some invisible hand … and in most cases even for free! How can you compare that smooth “user experience” to the hassle of fixing a broken or virus invested Windows machine?!
Care for your local data – always make backups. No matter how weird your backup medium is …
But dear consumers: beware what you are wishing for!
Just look how your cell phone company milks you for every bit of data you use via their network and devices. Do you really think that even bigger computer companies will play nice once they got you by the balls?
And one more thing: trying to get your data back from your crashed computer is one thing, getting your data back from a locked down server on another continent a totally different task …
