As Google moves forward with it’s “Nothing But ‘Net” operating system, with the first retail Chromebooks available June 15th, criticism of their strategy continues to abound. While it’s often compared to the furor over Apple’s bold statements prior to releasing the iPad, technologists’ skepticism over ChromeOS has an entirely different flavor. The iPad wasn’t really a new idea, Chromebooks are. Engineers had been trying to build a really great tablet since the advent of mobile computers, sci-fi writers have been describing them for nearly half a century, and I personally had been using one for years. While there were still a few extreme skeptics, the serious controversy was whether Apple would really be able to succeed in a market where some many others had failed to gain real traction, not whether people really wanted the device in the first place.
With Chromebooks, I’d say that things are completely different. Essentially no one has seriously considered a web only operating system and application suite until very recently. Outside of Google and their die-hard fans, it’s still uncommon to see it as likely. Google is truly attempting to create a new paradigm in computing, not just roll out a new form factor or interface method. I don’t think they are alone among tech companies in pursuing bits of this vision, which I’ll discuss in some later posts, but for now I’m going to focus on common critiques of their plan.
An editorial at MIT Technology Review, by Tom Simonite, offers six points for comment. While they aren’t necessarily the points I’d have picked to debate were I thinking about this in a vacuum, I think they are representative of the commentary brought up across the net since Google started seriously talking about ChromeOS.
It won’t work with your iPod.
At first glance, this seems to be an overly specific argument. No matter how popular a particular accessory is, not supporting a particular system has never proven sufficient in and of itself to derail a new idea. Furthermore, it’s not the case that Chrome couldn’t support the iPod, iPhone, and iPad… it just can’t support installation of the iTunes desktop client. In the end, that’s a good thing. iTunes is a terrible piece of software anyway, and if using ChromeOs would convince you to avoid it you should probably thank whatever God you believe in for small favors.
In a larger sense, this is an issue of hardware support far beyond Apple’s products. Many peripherals require are designed to use locally installed software in their regular operation, particularly portable media devices.
For corporate users, it’s not clear that this is a problem. Many enterprise environments would restrict the use of media syncing applications anyway… or even completely disable port connectivity. Given that Google is at least somewhat pushing their ChromeOS toward business and education applications there are areas of their rollout where this won’t matter much at all.
They’re too expensive.
This is a recent statement brought about by the release of pricing information for the first Chromebook models by Acer and Samsung. They do seem a little pricey when the headline specs are compared to Windows netbooks, then again it’s not clear that the comparison is fair. These machines aren’t netbooks… they aren’t even really computers in the traditional sense. They have features that no traditional netbook offers, most notably hardware OS verification, that probably aren’t even possible in a Windows machine. The comparison of ChromeOS to Windows as “open source and should be free” isn’t quite correct and it’s not appropriate to assume that the operating system should be discounted versus Windows.
People aren’t ready to trust the cloud.
Really? You could have fooled me. Adoption of cloud based services is rampant in both retail and corporate world. While the move has mainly been through the use of distinct applications (think Gmail) instead of unified application frameworks (think Google Apps) it is pretty clearly an unstoppable force. Like many such articles, the source referenced by Mr. Simonite uses the recent example of failure in one of Amazon’s EC2 regions as evidence that the cloud can’t be trusted to maintain data but there are some key problems with the argument.
To begin with, nobody ever said the cloud was invincible and anybody who expects web based services to be available 100% of the time is unrealistic. Purely internal IT services aren’t available 100% of the time, regardless of how physically close you are to the servers. The question isn’t whether the SaaS model or devices intended to rely on it are disaster proof, it’s how they stacks up to the real world disasters that can befall data stored on traditional machines or local networks.
It’s a goldmine for hackers.
I’m also not clear how this is the case. The author cites an expert from Kaspersky on the matter, but her argument is focused on single sign on, distributed environments in general. It’s not an issue endemic to Chromebooks and the fact that Google offers a single-sign-on app environment doesn’t fundamentally alter that.
Google can’t do hardware and support.
Citing Google’s history with products like the Nexus One, the article points out Google’s poor history of offering customer support. Nothing about the recent announcements indicate that Google is intending to take over hardware, versus relying on the product manufacturers to do so, but the technical support argument is valid.
In general, Google doesn’t believe that it’s possible to provide traditional customer support and essentially never really attempted it. As a user of Google Apps, I can tell you that this hasn’t changed as they’ve moved from gratis services to paid support for enterprise environments. They claim to be offering full support for their business and education users, but they say the same thing about Apps. You still can’t get live support for Apps and they haven’t figured out that you can’t submit tickets through the service if the service is totally inaccessible.
I’m something of a Google fan-boy, but I’ve got to call a spade a spade. They are bad at support and it’s not entirely clear whether they care. Then again, it hasn’t mattered much for their other services.
Google gets too much control.
While the nerd in me rages over the idea of not owning everything myself and wants badly to agree, I have to bow to reality here. This is the case with all manner of devices and services… but most customers don’t really care. From a retail perspective, companies like Apple would have never been even remotely successful if users really cared that “Big Brother” owned all their data and had their hand on a kill switch. From a corporate perspective, the idea of outsourcing data has only been problematic where it hasn’t been clearly proven to save money. Good business owners trust real results, not simply believing that handling everything themselves makes it better or safer. Most large enterprises already have some level of outsourced IT that is vital to their enterprise data maintenance, moving to the outsourcing of individual employee workstations isn’t really that much of a step. Google has some tasks it needs to focus on to make this work well for most consumers, such as clear ways to back up to traditional machines or migrate data to other services, but there seems little real world evidence that this sentiment will slow them down.
It’s worth noting that this year’s Forbes survey of corporate reputation placed Google as the 9th most trusted company in America. The only tech company ahead of them was Amazon, another provider of cloud services, in the first spot. Notably, Apple and Microsoft were 46th and 47th respectively.
Ultimately, only the trial and error of bringing a new device into the market will determine whether internet only devices will be a part of the future. It’s going to be a huge shift if the public starts to adopt these new “computer-like devices”, but it’s going to be a waiting game to be for sure. Speculation will serve to help drive decisions to test the waters or take business risks by choosing to support the platform, sales will make the final decision.
