How Chrome OS changes your world
Google’s Chrome OS, is based on Google’s Chrome web browser and the Linux kernel. What Chrome represents, however, is something much larger and far more significant for consumers than is realized with regard to data storage, IT and software licensing costs, and hardware savings.
With Chrome, the web and the browser are united as the platform for small computing; that is, either netbook or desktop computing done primarily online using cloud apps. Many saw this coming, notably IBM in the first half of this decade and has already setup businesses on the web. For example, my wife’s company of 60,000+ employees ditched both Microsoft Windows and Office last year in favor of Linux and putting their data in the cloud using Amazon’s S3 service. It wasn’t just Microsoft’s volume licensing costs that motivated that move, but the savings have allowed the company to both be more competitive and profit in a bad economy.
Chrome OS, as I have found with Linux over the past three years, can also turn back and clock and extend hardware life. Because cloud computing doesn’t require as fast a processor, as big a HD, as much memory, etc., all you need is a laptop, and barring that, a nine-year old desktop like the one I’m working on now! Normally, I’d scrap this system for parts, but Chrome is like getting a new engine in an old car. Feels good. Feels right.
I can’t do processor-intensive video editing on this old system, but I can surf the web and do 97% of what I do otherwise. But I also don’t have to worry about upgrading software or installing much locally. I already have my essential data stored online and backed up on a network of home computers along with tried and true discs.
What ties all this together is open source — Chrome is open source as is the Linux kernel it’s built upon. This means that your data is not locked into a proprietary format inside a proprietary program on a proprietary platform that you have to pay for over and over. I am free to walk away and take my data with me.
I can live with that. And so will you, in time.