Comment by fiaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fiaz | Hacker News Reader

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The article is spot on in asking a critical question about exactly how capable Google's offering is in reality as an OPERATING SYSTEM. To say that Google's OS is to provide a distributed storage mechanism is to bypass the concept of what an OS actually is - the gateway to the underlying hardware so that you can perform the functionality required to complete a specific task.

If Google's goal is to provide us with a distributed storage mechanism, then a better strategy would be to provide a better interface to their web offerings on existing operating systems.

No matter how much we desire a web-centric user experience, there will always be a need for software that takes advantage of all the computing power available in as small a foot print that is right in front of you. The question is will Google's OS provide this ability equally as well as Windows or Mac OSX can in order to be considered a "complete" operating system that has additional advantages.

That's the whole point of "cloud computing": the computer in front of you doesn't have and doesn't need much computing power. This is not a new idea; the "dumb terminal" concept has been around for decades.

what an OS actually is - the gateway to the underlying hardware so that you can perform the functionality required to complete a specific task

This is exactly correct. But in the case of Chrome OS, the real underlying hardware is the server youre connecting too, not your local machine. So photoshop (or similar photo editing software) will run on Chrome OS, but it's going to run in a network connected piece of software using server resources.

This minimizes the need for expensive local equipment, and dramatically increases the demands of the server. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the future Google plans on renting their server resources based on the number of CPU cycles you use!

> So photoshop (or similar photo editing software) will run on Chrome OS, but it's going to run in a network connected piece of software using server resources.

Like, say, Aviary.

I would agree, but it appears Google is banking on a lot of what we do on the desktop moving to the web in the next few years, and that is where they are hoping this will poise them to get a foothold.

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