GoogleGazer

Caesar Sengupta, Group Product Manager and Matt Papakipos, Engineering Director at Google have posted a short video about the new Google Chrome Operating System.

Chrome OS will be ready for users in a year, and the code has been put into the public domain. The official announcement is on Google’s Blog.

Chrome OS is a light-weight, speedy, and so-called stateless OS based on Linux that is designed to boot in 7 seconds or less. It assumes that both data and programs are stored in the Cloud. All applications are web apps.  Essentially, this means that,

• “If you throw a computer out the window, you should be able to recreate its software, configuration, and user data bit-for-bit identically on a new piece of hardware.
• In any managed deployment from school workstation lab to enterprise server room, single computers should never be modified. Instead, all computers that need the modification should be modified in a single step.”

It follows that a device running Chrome OS will not need a hard drive, users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.

It also follows from this that the device will only be usable “on-line,” and high-speed Internet access anywhere it’s used is a given.

In announcing Chrome OS, Google said,

[B]ecause all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn’t trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we’re going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video.

Now no one has said anything, but the GoogleGazer thinks it stands to reason that Google’s other OS effort, Google Anroid, a mobile device platform powered by the Linux kernel, and also in the public domain, will ultimately merge with Chrome OS.

Tim O’Reilly has been writing about light-weight operating systems access the Internet for years (see this example from 2002), and in an earlier post, the GoogleGazer pointed out that Prof. Robert Fano of MIT envisaged such an idea back in 1960, long before either PCs or the Internet became a reality.

Which all goes to prove,  as  Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in Les Guêpes (January 1849), “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same)”.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Uncategorized Tagged: | Android, Chrome OS, Robert Fano, Stateless OS, Tim O'Reilly