Thoughts on Google Chrome OS

Today Google announced Google Chrome OS, its longed been rumored and known that it was coming, but now it is official and open source. Google Chrome OS is basically a bootable browser will all your stuff saved to Google servers with a local (encrypted) cache to speed up browsing. But there lies the issue, its a browser and thus you need an internet connection. There were some cool things that Google Chrome OS can do like boot in about 7 seconds, (theres no startup processes or anything besides the browser), and it automatically checks to make sure that nothing is corrupted by checking the signatures of files, if anything is corrupted it will rebuild your machine, which isn’t really a big deal since all your stuff is in the cloud.

Chrome OS will use mainly Google tools to open PDF’s and documents, however, according to the demo it looks like you can set 3rd pary tools, like Office Web Apps, as the default, in the case of the Demo, the Excel Web App was used as opposed to Google Spreadsheets. There is another issue, do you trust Google, Microsoft, or any company in that case with your data? Microsoft had issues with sidekick data not to long ago, and GMail does have its occcasional outage, and what happens when the cloud hosting your data has an outage.

What about a more likely story. What happens when your internet goes out, or you don’t have access to it. All your data is inaccessable. Google has stated that Chrome OS will only be available on new netbooks, which are designed to be very portable, which means I might not always have access to internet.

Google does have Google Gears but that only works with some apps. Could Google Chrome OS’s lack of offlineability lead to its demise?