Have Google Just Changed The Face Of Personal Computing With Chromebook?
As expected this week Google are putting a lot of effort in to their new Chrome OS which for us geeks is a pretty interesting concept and for the man on the street could change the way we all think about computers. Launched today at IO the video below explains a lot but the main point is that a lot of the things we do these days on a computer are stored in the cloud in one shape or another. We save out email online, many of us use online document editors and calendars so Google is tapping in to that by offering a new series of computers with partners Acer and Samsung that will do nothing apart from give you access to the web. These will be cheap computers that last a full days charge and that strip away all the excess and leave you with nothing but the web. All the talk in recent months on this blog has been about Google squaring up to Facebook in the battle for social but with this latest move they have their oldest enemy Microsoft in the cross hairs and are very much trying to make the traditional Windows operating system a thing of the past. So just what is a Google Chromebook?
Why Chromebooks Will be Great
Google does a great job in this video of explaining why exactly we need a new way of using our computers and shows a lot of the common problems that we have with more traditional operating systems…
Why Get A Chromebook?
This latest launch doesn’t come as much of a surprise for people following Google as they have been building Chrome OS for a couple of years now. Getting it out on to physical hardware and getting people to buy it is not something that Google has been able to manage to do until today. As they say themselves…
These are not typical notebooks. With a Chromebook you won’t wait minutes for your computer to boot and browser to start. You’ll be reading your email in seconds. Thanks to automatic updates the software on your Chromebook will get faster over time. Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won’t need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files. Chromebooks will last a day of use on a single charge, so you don’t need to carry a power cord everywhere. And with optional 3G, just like your phone, you’ll have the web when you need it
It’s a pretty compelling story and it shows what can be done by stripping away all that excess that live on computers today. I love Google Chrome for it’s sheer speed and if these Chromebooks are anything like that I would certainly consider giving it a spin.
All About Google’s Suite Of Products
Google has a very clear strategy to put everything online and I for the first time with this launch we can see it all starting to come together. Most of Google’s products and especially their revenue generating ones live online so the more time Google can have you spending their via it’s own properties the better. Everything from Google Adsense and Adwords right through to their Chrome app store and the new Google music will live online and this latest move is all about getting more customers to those platforms so as Google can generate more sales. Simple but effective. Below is the video for their new music product which you can see fitting in perfectly with these new Chromebooks.
Will This Work?
It might do. I don’t think the whole world is going to go out and buy one of these tomorrow but there is no doubt that Google are tapping in to this in a very smart way. Most of us flick our laptops on and although they have a ton of native applications, programs and other features we all head straight for the web. I personally use Google Docs but I know a lot of people have issues with the functionality still and prefer Microsoft Word and the like which is fair enough. Google Docs will get better over time though and as connection speeds, computing power and cloud computing come together with perfect timing this really is the first time that everything could probably live online. The key is that these are going to be very cheap computers because there is very little to them and it’s emerging markets like China and India that could be lapping these up in the future. I don’t think these will be an overnight success but they will certainly speed up the shift towards everything in our daily lives being online.
