Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud

(August, 2009)

By:  Wayne Maruna

Every home computer has at its core an operating system.  You can get pretty technical trying to define an operating system, but let’s just try this on for size.  The operating system is the major piece of software on your machine that accepts input from the user (key strokes or mouse), sends it out to the appropriate application software, and coordinates all the activities of the application and the hardware to get them to do the things you want them to do (at least most of the time), and then presents the results back to you in a form that a human can understand, be it through a visual display, printed output, or sound.  That definition may not stand up to technical scrutiny, but for purposes of this article, it should suffice.

For home users, your choice of operating system comes down to Microsoft Windows, an Apple O/S (e.g. Mac OS X), or one of many dozens of Linux distributions.  To say that Windows dominates is an understatement.  Most recent market share data indicates that Windows has about 88% market share, Apple has about 10%, and Linux is striving to reach 1% despite its essentially free price.  In the business arena, the Windows share is even higher.  Microsoft is not afraid to throw its considerable weight around, earning it, in the view of many, the title of ‘Evil Empire’.

And so it came as a bit of a surprise when internet search giant Google recently announced that it was planning to release an operating system called Google Chrome, the same name given to its web browser which seeks to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, among others.  The announcement caused a brief flurry or activity in the tech press.

Google’s reason for undertaking the significant task of developing and marketing an alternative OS I suspect is, as with most such ventures, financially driven, even though it will essentially be given away.  I also suspect there is some ego involved, along with the sheer enjoyment of pulling on Microsoft’s Superman cape.  Google issued a press release which contained an exceptionally good synopsis of what irritates home users about their computers. This is Google’s official explanation of the problems that it is trying to solve with Chrome OS:

“People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.”

 The last point is clearly self-serving for Google, but setting that aside, when I read the above paragraph I thought “Man, these people get it.”  Their solution involves what the press is calling ‘cloud computing’ where your PC is a relatively stripped down device, and all your activity is web-based.  The applications are web-enabled, and your data files are all kept at some remote location, not on a local hard drive.  Admittedly, I am not comfortable with that last concept, but many people today already maintain on-line backups (see www.carbonite.com as one example).

However, what took a lot of wind out of the sails of the announcement was the revelation that the ‘new OS’ was going to be built around a Linux kernel (core), and would first be available only on netbooks, the ultra-small laptop devices which are the fastest growing segment of the computer market.  I think the tech writers then took the view that this was going to be just another in a long line of customized Linux distributions.  Linux is always going to be the ‘next big OS’, but it seems like it is always going to happen tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.

In my experience, the bug-a-boo with Linux for the home user is the hurdle of getting wireless and a wide range of peripherals to work, things like printers and scanners, because Linux’s market share is so small that hardware makers don’t see value in expending the resources to develop drivers to work with Linux.  This of course, becomes a circular chain of events that goes nowhere.  Perhaps with an industry giant like Google stepping in, that will change.

Why the initial foray only into netbooks?  Google is all about web surfing.  They make money when you view their ads.  Netbooks are largely about emailing and web viewing when not at home.  Plus, I’m guessing this will limit the number of wireless device drivers Google's developers need to worry about.  I recently purchased an Asus EEE-PC netbook that came with Windows, but I installed a dual-boot arrangement with a specialized version of Linux called Eeebuntu that was designed for the specific hardware of my netbook, and hallelujah, wireless worked right out of the box.

For those interested in alternative OSes, mark down October 17^{th, 2009} on your calendar.  John Melchior, an Apple expert who lives in Greenbrier, is going to present to the New Bern Computer User Group that morning. And then at the January meeting the group hopes to have a live demonstration of Red Hat Linux. Additional details will follow closer to those events.