[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 01:28:04PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> OS X runs my apps native, Google wants them in the cloud.

Big difference. The cloud only exists in places that have some sort of
compatible service that you can use. 

I know a desktop computer will not need WiFi as you can have a wired 
Internet service, but why run a cloud based system on a desktop?

> It's Linux.  We already know what it is.

Well, sort of. Linux is a Kernel, but Google/OS is a distribution. Compare
Ubuntu versus Fedora, or YellowDog, Mandrake, Debian, etc. They all have
a different "look and feel" and a different set of features. 

We know what's under the covers, but we don't know what it will look like
on the outside and how a user will see it.


> It's yet another platform, and we already know we don't need it.


No we don't, but THEY do. Google has come to the end of the gravy train. As
long as they were able to keep getting advertising to pay for everything,
they were ok. Now that advertising is down, advertisers want purchases for
their dollars, not just website traffic. Clicks no longer count, sales do.

Google is trying to move their targeted advertising away from web searches to
everything you use your computer for. So instead of getting links to recipies
for Spam dishes when you check your email, now you will get advertising when
you write your shopping list. 

Let me tell you a story. In the late 1980's the White House installed PROFS,
one of the first commercial email systems. Every loved it, instead of 
sending a paper memo which someone could keep in a file and bring it out
later, these emails were ephermeral. Delete them and they were gone.

Or so they thought. PROFS kept an archive copy of EVERY email sent through it.
You could delete the archive and start over, but you could not remove a
single email from it. 

Enter Oliver North, who ran a covert operation, specificaly against US law
from the White House. He did everything via email, assuming it would disapear
when it was read and deleted. 

One of the backup tapes of the PROFS archive ended up at the Washington Post.

Bottom line: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, trust your data to be private if you
don't have control of it.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM