Chrome OS: What Is It Good For?

If Google was looking for a warm welcome for its Chrome OS and the new Cr-48 laptops it is currently giving away to select beta testers, well then it was wrong. The actual hardware has received a reception colder than Scrooge’s heart. Folks at TechCrunch have given it a verbal whiplashing that would make a drill sergeant proud. For past three days I have been using the Cr-48 and here are my impressions.

The Mini-Review

First, the hardware:

The boot-up is extremely fast and the log-on process is smooth and speedy, as long as one has a Google Mail account. (Google Apps ID doesn’t quite work.)
The screen is great but the graphic capabilities are pretty limited.
There is one single USB port and a flash memory card slot. Frankly having lived with the old MacBook Air with a single USB port, I don’t see much of a problem.
The trackpad is god-awful.
I love the dedicated Search button and would love to see it on all computers.
The laptop picked up most of the commonly used USB peripherals – both a Logitech mouse and a Microsoft optical mouse worked just fine, without need for special discovery or driver installs.

Second, the User Interface/Experience

The Interface is rough-around the edges and what you see is essentially the Chrome web-browser.
It takes too many cues from Microsoft Windows, which is understandable, considering they are going after the mainstream and enterprise market.
The OS needs better font support, and reminds me of some early Linux distributions.
The user experience expects us to come to the idea of using browser tabs instead of apps, a weird notion, but not that strange if you have used Chrome browser as your primary browser and are used to cloud-based services.
If you use Google Chat and Google Tasks, then you easily understand the idea of “Panels” a new feature inside of Chrome OS that run in small, easy-to-access panes at the bottom right of the browser.
Even the best web apps currently available at the Chrome Web Store are a work in progress.
The biggest challenge for Google’s Chrome OS is that it is going to be fighting against many life-long habits of using a desktop OS.

Now for the Cloud-based Services:

Despite being severely underpowered, there is one thing the device does very well – let you use Google apps, especially Google Docs, Gmail and other cloud services (from Google) without a problem.
The YouTube experience is marginal at best and Netflix doesn’t work.
Most of your browser-based apps will work, but Adobe Flash on Chrome OS is like a toddler learning to crawl. It would be a long time before it gets to the maturity of Adobe on Windows platform. Adobe has already stated that it plans to improve its integrated Flash performance in Chrome OS, essentially calling it a “work-in-progress.”

Bottom line: Will I use Cr-48 or something like it as my primary computer? It would be tough for me – I admit I have a life long habit of using a full desktop operating system – to make Chrome OS my primary computing experience. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep an open mind, but for now, it is a no-go for me. My more portable 2.13 GHz MacBook Air is the machine I like and even as I spend a lot of time inside the browser, I prefer a desktop with the Chrome browser and raw power. Plus my Mac has Silverlight, which let’s me play Netflix and use third-party native apps such as Reeder.

But as Google very clearly stated, this particular device isn’t going to be sold in the market – its partners are going to make devices that consumers can buy. I hope they do a better job and come-up with more attractive hardware.

The real story to focus on is the ChromeOS and what it really means and whom it targets.

So let’s do that instead.

The Rise of the Web OS

The growth of Google has coincided with the shift to the web. Google is a company that has been a believer in networked-computing from its very inception. Since 2004, an increasing amount of our focus and attention has been devoted to the browser and what we can do inside the browser. The so-called Web 2.0 concept only helped enhance the inside-the-browser experience, thus slowly replacing desktop as our primary focus of attention.

Thanks to new technologies, ample bandwidth and Moore’s Law, the concept of a web operating system has become a reality. The web isn’t really an OS in the classical sense of the word, but instead is a platform to do things – for making phone calls, playing games, writing documents, sending emails, instant messaging and even photo editing. These are some of the tasks some of us old-fogeys still do on our desktop operating systems using desktop software. But slowly and surely that desktop era is coming to an end.

Google last week announced its much-awaited Cloud OS, the Chrome OS, which is nothing more than just a browser running on a stripped down version of Linux to capitalize on the hardware features such as audio and video. In the end, Chrome is about doing things on the web, inside a browser. Apple, of course has taken a different tack for its cloud OS. The iOS which powers iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad fosters the idea of using small chunks of code for doing specialized tasks and embedding the browser inside these apps.

In a blog post this past week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote:

So we’ve gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks, to a world where we have reliable networks and basically no disks. Architecturally that’s a huge change—and with HTML5 it is now finally possible to build the kind of powerful apps that you take for granted on a PC or a Macintosh on top of a browser platform. You can build everything that you used to mix and match with client software—taking full advantage of the capacity of the web.

The Enterprise

As a consumer, one is going to find Chrome OS very limiting, especially since have some pre-conceived notions about what a personal computer is supposed to do. In addition, the availability of superphones and tablets makes Chrome OS less necessary form a consumer standpoint – they are more consumer-friendly and quite capable devices.

Google’s own Android OS is already in front of the consumers (in form of phones and tablets.) It will sometime next year when first Chrome OS devices will come to the market, and it won’t be up until end of 2011 when (or if) Chrome OS become a viable option in the market place. And by then, as I wrote earlier, “who knows where Android will be.” If the early popularity of tablets is any indication, consumer computing is moving towards the tablet form-factor and for Android – that is indeed a good thing.

In comparison, Chrome OS is ideally suited for business environments that need lots of low cost computers designed to do certain specific tasks, cheaply and without much maintenance. Rolling out centrally managed apps minus security problems and maintenance hassles has been the Holy Grail for corporate computing. Chrome OS and HTML5-based web apps that run inside the browser are a perfect solution, as I argued in my earlier post.

Our GigaOM Pro analyst David Card agreed (subscription required) in his research note:

Chrome OS also suffers from awkward positioning, both externally, to developers and potential customers, and internally within Google’s own product line-up. While it’s true that PCs serve both companies and consumers, the value of the Network Computer premise appeals only to enterprise IT managers. Its manageability and simplified functionality play best in applications like airline reservations, point of sale terminals and ATMs, or in limited-application mobile devices used in shipping and store inventory management. Yet at least for now, app stores are purely consumer offerings. The apps Google showed last week all came from media companies (New York Times, NPR, Sports Illustrated), Electronic Arts and Amazon.

Google will be best suited to focus Chrome OS and all its energies on business buyers — call centers, retail outlets and airlines to start with – and forget about the consumers.

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