Today I watched the Google Chrome OS demonstration (11 minutes) video on YouTube®. Here is what I thought of it.
Here are my thoughts as I had (time to type) them.
- Does the public care how fast a computer boots up? There’s got to be an acceptable tolerance that has already been met by the Google Chrome OS efforts.
- The presenter has a Jeff Goldblum vibe going on.
- The demo was from code checked into trunk? Wonder if the demo will fall on its face at some point …
- I hope the UI changes for “application tabs”; favorite icons aren’t the best way to identify different properties. A plus will be that it becomes more useful for an app developer (I’m looking your way, Atlassian) to use separate favicons for its products.
- The favicons do have the benefit of being i18n-friendly.
- Panels remind me of the old Google Notebook Firefox add-on. I wonder if Gmail will use panels for its chat window.
- Note to self: games do not necessarily mean 3D.
- Multiple windows feels a lot like virtual desktops.
- I hope Google posts their use cases along with their source code. I doubt it will happen, but one can hope.
- Google has got to be working hard to keep Microsoft Office online from breaking in Chrome.
- The video sure ends abruptly.
I think Google has a hard sell in front of them; I’d love to know who Chrome OS is for. I know I would love a fast, little netbook that is really good at the few things it should do, but we have a 25 year history of PCs that continue to reinforce comparisons between things that have keyboards, pointing devices, and monitors. Perhaps Google doesn’t want many folks actually using Chrome OS but want to leverage it as an experiment to create more markets for web applications. Maybe they were really inspired by the One-Laptop-Per-Child project and want a cheap, useful PC to be able to be disseminated.
