Google Chrome OS – A Welcome Change for Developers
Wayne Helman on July 8, 2009
4 Comments
This morning, Google announced plans to release a new OS. This comes as welcome news for most developers and Linux enthusiasts. It’s been a long wait for a major player to back a Linux based product (although there have been attempts) and I have a feeling Google will succeed in their efforts.
The good news for developers is that it opens up an entirely new market for application development. Although Google has been hanging carrots in front of us for a while with Google App Engine, distribution of apps developed on that platform is a challenge. With a new OS geared specifically toward running web based applications, Google can create an environment similar to what Apple has done for the iPhone.
I have a feeling this is just the start for Google. The OS announced is far from a full blown OS like Windows or OSX, however, it’s open source and has the potential to grow organically. The real question in my mind is what are Google’s marketing plans for the OS? How will they position it? And what market share are they really after? If we look at what they did to the advertising industry, they must have something up their sleeves for the OS.
October 30th, 2009 @ 11:33 AM
I’d prefer a totally new OS, competitive to any existent. One that would focus on extreme speed, that would boot faster than a television (even if that means some extra hardware add-ons), would have a revolutionary interface (everything in this area has been practically frozen for decades – no I don’t consider Vista or Win 7 improvements), would have 100% protection from crashing and that would require in worst case 1 security-hole fixing per year.
Everything else, is just different versions of the same story.
October 30th, 2009 @ 11:42 AM
I think everybody would agree that if we could get rid of start up times, crashing, and processing times, we would basically have the perfect OS. Unfortunately, the architecture of modern day computing simply does not support such goals. We’ve come a long way since floppy disks and IO speeds are far faster then they have ever been, but the shear amount of data keeps growing and with hardware and software architectures as they are (from a low level perspective), I can’t see the utopian computer OS arriving anytime soon.
October 30th, 2009 @ 1:26 PM
Wayne, its all about optimization and priorities. The amount of data has been increased very-very much, yes, but so has the hardware capabilities. In fact, the hardware of a 486 PC of the early nineties cannot compare at all with a today’s workstation. Now, can we say the same for the software? Have there been innovations in coding techniques that made it lightning fast and extremely efficient?
Definitely NOT! Whatever “improvements” have been made in software development, are mostly for the benefit of developers -NOT the users.
So today the developers can develop software fast, but NOT fast software! Actually the software is very slow, large and embeds all the bureaucracy of the world! They get away with it because of the very fast hardware. It is also highly dependent on other pieces of software that should exist on the PC.
Also, almost all companies release their software semi-developed, with countless bugs. You buy a software application today and the majority of bugs (problems, errors) are fixed not before 2-3 years. The software developer tools have been improved for quantity NOT quality. See the statistics: A huge amount of projects, are abandoned yearly because of “spaghetti code”! One more reason for the crisis…
So in sort, we need:
1. Development tools user-centric NOT developer-centric -the first priority should be for the user so that the end result would be fast and efficient.
2. Research for coding techniques, languages etc that would eliminate or reduce the appearance of bugs to a minimum. This will make the development very cheap, since currently the debugging outweigh the cost of the development! Also the software will of much higher quality and the users much happier!
Then such an OS would be rather easy to make… but this doesn’t mean it can’t be done today with much more effort and perfectionism…