My experience is that "legacy" refers to "any software that we want to put down or don't want to support 100% any more", so I guess Google decided all native software was legacy the minute they announced Chrome OS.

I've seen the same thing happen with code internally - a developer writes an untested replacement for a component and then instantly declares the old version "legacy", even though it still works fine.

I'm a little uncomfortable about the wording of this sentence too. Perhaps if they were called traditional desktop apps, I would've been happier.

I still like to run a lot more desktop apps and some things are just not there as a webapp, or certainly not as tweakable. But I can give Google that much, I'm perhaps not their target audience. Which is also fine by me. What I'm worried about is the mom-pop people who will use it in the appropriate fashion, will have young kids also using them. I don't want to sound like the old guard here and I'm happy to see Google making real progress in making computing for everyone, but there is something about running my first Basic program on my parent's computer or accidentally fdisk'ing the whole thing, that I hope the nextgen of geeks don't get to miss out on. With wording such as 'legacy software', I just hope they somehow come to tinker with the OS too rather than just seeing better webapps.

Probably when SysAdmins did too, as I believe the ChromeOS program manager was quoted along those lines the other day. The wording was closer to pink slipping them completely, but I'm going off the top of my head here.

I think the pilot program is about right for something as bold as how they're marketing this. Putting as many of these in the hands of the very people they're pissing at and saying "ok, you tell us then" is the only way to change some minds. If they don't ship 100,000 of these to smart people, I can't see it taking off.

The marketing is horrendous otherwise. A new sort of web based platform? I get that, I'm ok with that. A new sort of product that has marketing materials telling me my opinions are bullhookey and a PM that wants to see me out of a job is another.

I think that is precisely their mindset. For 99% users, once you move office-suite applications to the cloud, 99% of their computer use is on websites. Therefore, the operating system and "legacy" PC software should fade from view.

Native apps became legacy on June 24, 2010. [release date of first iPhone :)]

Don't worry, they will become cool again for chrome OS in another year or so.

[oops, copied the wrong date from wikipedia. you get the idea...]