Google’s vice president for Chrome engineering, Linus Upson, believes that 60% of businesses could immediately switch to Chrome OS and put corporate system administrators out of work. At least that’s what The New York Times reported he said, though the paper didn’t quote Upson directly. But would YOU want to use Chrome OS for your work?
Last month Phil Wainewright drew parallels between Chrome OS and forgotten “dummy terminal” projects like Oracle‘s Network Computer and Sun‘s Javastation.
“The thing I’ve always noticed is that no one ever says, ‘I want one of those.'” Wainewright wrote “The proposition is always promoted as an ideal solution for someone else’s computing needs.”
To Google’s credit, it’s starting at the top and giving CEO Eric Schmidt a Chrome OS computer, but the question remains: who really wants to use it?
Steve Jobs talked about replacing desktop OSes with web OSes as early as 1996, and Apple originally encouraged developers to create web apps instead of native apps for the iPhone. But Apple has obviously moved away from that line of thinking. It’s true that iOS is a slimmed down version of OSX, but it’s also more than just a browser. Apple has been moving towards appliances and context-aware computing, instead of generic web terminals.
And for business use, many workers need more than a puny, underpowered machine. Wainewright writes that call center workers will actually need faster computers than the rest of us, even when using web-based tools, because response time is critical.
We recently covered five cloud-centric OSes available today. Some of them have been around for years, and can run on old desktop computers. None of them has yet to catch fire in the enterprise or anywhere else – not even Meego, which is sponsored by Intel and Nokia. It seems that people are more excited about Android than Chrome OS.
Is Chrome OS, or one of the alternatives, something YOU would want to use?
