As I was reading about the ChromeOS announcement on Engadget and Techcrunch this afternoon and early evening, my reaction slowly went from “Is that it?” to “Huh?” to “That is brilliant”.  And, finally I settled on my overall opinion of the announcement—ChromeOS is brilliant, but a couple years too early.

On the surface, the OS looks pretty good.   The early UI concept video shows an intuitive interface, although I think it needs a lot of work.  The two big UI issues I noticed were the panels and the window management.  I thought how the panels hovered above the browser was pretty annoying.  And, the window switching seemed like an afterthought.   I really didn’t like how there is no indication on the screen on how many windows you have open.

The idea behind the OS itself is pretty brilliant—the browser is the OS.   Your images would be stored on Flickr.  Your music would come from GrooveShark.  Your email and documents would come from Gmail, Office Live, etc.  And best of all, the OS will run on extremely cheap hardware.  This means that we could potentially have it running on $100 laptops, tablets, and MIDs.

But, like I said at the beginning, the idea is still a couple years too early.  I think Gizmodo did the best job of laying out the requirements for this new OS to be successful.  The Internet needs to be ubiquitous, it needs to be faster, and web applications need to be better.  In the short term, I don’t think Google OS will be too useful to me.  I cannot develop on it.  I cannot run Photoshop on it.  And, I really don’t want to do word processing on it.  All these tasks are still better on Windows.  With that said, I could definitely see myself running this OS on a complementary device in the near future.  For example, if you stuck it on a multi-touch tablet for $200, it could be a killer device.  In the long term, I think that ChromeOS has the potential to be a large competitor in the OS market, because it is perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the coming advances in web technology.

That was quick, pundits are already predicting ChromeOS to be a failure. I don’t agree.  Like I said, for this OS to be successful in the short term, it has to be on really cheap, single purpose hardware.  Listen Google, put this on $200 multi-touch tablet and people will buy it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.