The computing landscape is changing right now, and any company that revolves around servicing Windows desktop software is going to be in for a real hard time.
Whether or not Google's Chrome OS is the eventual successor is not clear (I don't think it is), but their general idea is correct. The all-network, all-cloud world is coming whether you like it or not.
And where do you expect the operating system and marvelous web stack where all these things are created to reside? Burned in EEPROM?
I think the consumer already can't really differentiate between what is local or over the internet, they don't know what a browser is by and large.
But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything.
Castrating the device and agitating the users by making everything Microsoft Palladium style will continue to be a bad idea. Remember Sun's motto, "The network is the computer"?
Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer. Networks are pretty important, but they do not replace everything, they are fundamentally not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to.
And every time a step is made in any of those directions, it's done because some machine or some network, somewhere else, is better off. That rising tide will lift all boats, keeping the consumer devices edging ahead; that is unless, you are harking back to the "give consumers bare minimum craptaculous cloud terminals".
That's been tried about every 3 months for the past 35 years or so and has never gone well.
One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity. Its in the very infant stages but its coming. For what its worth Im typing this on my Cr-48 which has 3G so I'm pretty much there.
I'm inclined to agree especially in cases like movies or music. The idea that we all have a copy of a song on our hard drives is odd. Leaving aside ideas of copyright and licenses there really isnt a reason all media shouldnt live in some kind of shared music/video folder in the sky. I'm going to watch Breaking Bad S2E4 maybe a handful of times and eventually forget about it. Keeping it in the cloud frees the user from needing to think about keeping it or backing it up or deleting it.
Or maybe I'm biased from living in a fairly cloudy world already.
Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching
for vast landscapes of local storage systems.
Nah, don't think so; the computer is the computer.
Network... is not reliable, responsive, or resilient enough to.
Apple might have successfully convinced everyone into thinking that downloading software and installing it is some fancy new thing, but really just it's old-fashioned nonsense that is only necessary for their arcane software platform to work.
Web apps solved the problem of having to figure out how to find, install, or update software and not having it everywhere you go. App stores have caught up on discovery/installation/updates, and mobile has solved the problem of not having it everywhere I go.
Web apps will eventually catch up on performance and maybe someday they will feel like first class citizens in any given OS rather than being relegated to mess of throwaway tabs. We've been within 3 years of that for something like a decade, but maybe we really finally are within 3 years of that.
But we aren't within 3 years of having any two web apps looking similar and using familiar UI elements. Every web app is a new UI to learn, maybe not a problem for you or me, but mobile has reached 3 year olds and 90 year olds and everyone in between, most of whom have not acquired the skill to pick up umfamiliar UIs and don't want to.
As for data moving to the cloud, I'm with you. And I have a lot of native apps that interact with remote data.
Watch it.
The problem with native apps is the installation barrier- if I had apps installed to do everything that I'd love my phone to do, I'd be overwhelmed with hundreds of apps installed. Web-based apps have the potential to slip in and out of use as necessary, with more applicable discovery mechanisms (geo, proximity, etc).
On the development side of things I believe we're going to see a massive shift back to web-app development simply because of economics. There is no way any small group of developers can build desktop, iOS, and Android versions of their application simultaneously. This iOS fad WILL DIE because of costs, and that fact that Android numbers are rising dramatically, and people need to come up with a way to support each mobile platform and be able to use that app from their desktops too -- mobile web apps are the answer.
Next you're gonna tell me they're gonna introduce a language which when compiled into a single compressed file in some kind of 'virtual mechanism' will run on any platform and everyone will use it because the technology is so much better than anything else.
I had this conversation with my girlfriend the other day:
Her: If ____ had a [mobile] app I'd waste so much time on it.
Me: You know you can use their website on your phone, right?
Her: Yeah, but apps are so much better.
Out of curiosity, I went to this particular site on my phone and they actually do have a mobile web app, complete with home screen icon and the meta tags to make it fullscreen. If you add it your homescreen it could pass as a decent native app.
There are two problems with web apps right now:
1) Quality. It's pretty hard to make really nice mobile web apps, or apps in general. There are lots of behaviors in the browser that are un-app-like which you need to work around. Native platforms were designed for apps from the start. Performance can also be an issue (possibly solved by something like NativeClient).
2) Discoverability. Users look for app in the app store first. If they don't find it they often don't check for a mobile web app, either because they're not aware they exist or they assume it will be crap. App stores need to have better integration for web apps. In the meantime, wrappers like PhoneGap can help.
Also why would someone pay 10 dollars a month for 50 GB of space in the cloud when you can buy 1 TB portable hard drives for dirt cheap?
housefires.
Heh. "Pandora didn't get half the kicking around she deserved", as I think that R.A.Heinlein jokingly put it.
(Not that I believe that GP is that prescient.)
I always like people who over-simplify things to the extreme. They don't seem to understand that different solutions exist because there are different needs. Ever thought about doing video editing of a More-than-HD-video on a network connection ? Ever thought of RAW images storage, taking up 30 seconds to load one image through your ISP? Ever thought of people living away from large cities, with slow internet connection ?
Obviously not. You must be living in a microcosm where everyone has 1Tb/s Net access under their tables.
Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!
I'll be hanging on to my local hard drive tooth and nail. (Backing up to S3 or something mind you, but make no mistake my local disk is the master copy.)
A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.
And business... pushing all your data to the cloud is a mistake. For many reasons such as; security. Look there is no way I'm putting sensitive data, like accounting, patient information, (etc) in the cloud. It's just not worth the risk or the lawsuit.
Also, I know a guy who owns a gym. Was talked into a "hosted cash register". BIG MISTAKE. After the install, a week later early morning storm rolls in from the ocean. His power flips (a common thing in South Florida). But his Comcast never came back online. He was down (and out of business) for 4 hours. Personally though, I enjoyed hearing his plight. He's a cheap sob.
Some of you might say, that is what he deserves for relying on Comcast. Fine. But what small business you know it gonna go through the expense of a T1/3 or fiber? That $29.99 a month cash register just became $300+ a month. Lovely.
My point: out in the real world (in America) the infrastructure is barely stable. Until the carries seriouslly invest (and I doubt they ever will since they only provide exactly what they have too - I don't even want to get started on our TERRIBLE cell service in this country) in their networks, the "cloud" will be a site you share pictures of your dog.
Thick apps aren't going anywhere in the near future. Video Editing, Adobe Photoshop - they'll all be huge-honking local apps for at least another 10-15 years.
Some work might have to be done to minimize the amount of data that gets transferred when saving and loading, but that's about it. I'm sure if you compress your 100MB Slide Decks file you'll find it much easier to send over!
True, companies will encourage voluntarily uploading your stuff to their computers. Why shouldn't they? Just like they solicit your email address, track your movements, snarf your smartphone address book and other neat tricks. There's value in getting that info.
That doesn't mean everyone is going to fall for it. Some will, no doubt.
But GB's are getting cheaper every day. And not just for "cloud providers". How many terbaytes does one person need? You can fit your whole life's worth of data onto today's capacities of consumer digital storage.
Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media? What drugs are you on?
The web is brittle. It's but one of many things that can be run over IP. You web-fanatics crack me up.
Are we to imagine a future where consumers cannot purchase storage media?
My bet is within 3 years we'll reach the threshold where it might as well be worth it to store files online rather download them and store them permanently on hard drives on a computer running constantly in your home.
If someone (Google, Mozilla) pushed for it, this could be merged with a browser API / VirtualBox for speed and completeness, and you could download a paused machine with state.
It's not happening now, but it's possible already.
Inferno IE4 plugin: http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/plugin/index.html
Lively Kernel: http://www.lively-kernel.org/
Native apps may be toast, but they won't go without a fight.
Clearly you have the religious fervor upon you. Personally I like it when I see the benefits. Currently that's for a subset of my computing tasks. Sharing stuff? Sure. Off-site backup, OK. Most other stuff? I'm happy sticking to the PC model rather than the thin client-mainframe timeshare model.
On the whole, the ability to transparently cache big chunks of data locally turns out to offer a superior user experience in many non insignificant use cases (e.g. Downloading content for later consumption while off grid).
I don't think it's clear that the web approach will win out, and I certainly think it will not be settled in three years. And photo and video libraries (which are popular and growing faster than bandwidth or storage) aren't going to the cloud any time soon.
Until mobile browsers have access to the full range of hardware on a device (camera, microphone), native apps will have an edge. Example: camera/pictures - ios doesn't allow camera/cameraroll access from the browser, android does, and wp7 used to but removed it. If you want to offer people a way to send you pictures from your app, it's gotta be native for now.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that similar predictions haven't panned out in the past.
The web is for documents.
Want to make a bet? Name your stakes.
He's really just addressing the elephant in the room by saying that as of yet the whole open source desktop mess has failed to produce anything that looks like a compelling , easy to use desktop.
If Google can produce a Linux based operating system that addresses the needs of casual users and power users/technophiles (like Linus) and get it on enough hardware (i.e not just netbooks but "serious" desktops as well) then they can (combined with android) simply eat everyone elses lunch.
What is not so important necessarily is whether or not local storage or local apps will "go away" but that Google understands that a modern OS needs to treat "the cloud", i.e webapps , online storage , social networks as first class citizens inside the OS. This is a metaphor that is missing (in a really intuitive form) mostly from even new OSes like Windows 8.
Hard disks are not dead, but I think the idea of having C:\Program Files\.. is. Even as a technical user myself the directory hierarchy is mostly just an abstraction that gets in my way. My work (i.e source code) is in git, my games are in Steam, my email is at google , my music on Spotify and all the "other stuff" is in dropbox.
What I need is an OS that ties all of these things together seamless regardless of whether the bytes themselves reside on the disk inside my computer or on some website somewhere but can provide sufficient tools when needed to fix leaky abstractions.
Let's suppose you could buy a new workstation soon that ran a nice clean Chrome OS desktop but had sufficient memory and hardware level virtualization that simply clipping in a "proper" Linux or all the MS libraries such as DirectX that you needed to run Windows apps was a trivial activity that could be abstracted away from the end user if required. Would you not be curious to buy one?
If Google can produce a Linux based operating system that addresses the needs of casual users... [they can] simply eat everyone elses lunch.
He also addresses the elephant in the room that the major Linux UI pushes that consciously and grandly targeted those goals were grand steps backwards. That the things the UI prognosticators think users want, like abstraction and simplification, alienated real Linux users like Linus. That normal users missed features the UI cognoscenti banished as "too confusing," such as "easy mouse configurability for things like how to launch applications."
When you talk about abstraction, metaphors, making the filesystem invisible to users, and (most telling of all) appealing to "casual users" it sounds like more of the same talk that we've had for many years now. The more grand and self-conscious the community gets about user interfaces, and the more they target non-techie users, the less useful the desktop environments become for their actual users. That missing configurability that Linus laments, which was sacrificed for the sake of "casual" users -- did we really attract a bunch of casual users? Did we eat anyone's lunch, take market share from OSX or Windows? Or did we just make our desktop environments less usable for the people who actually use them?
Linus says GNOME was "useless" without that configurability, and that this new device might be usable as a laptop if it had a terminal and a development environment. That doesn't sound like a call for Linux environments to appeal to "casual" users. I don't think Linus is asking for even more simplifications to get in the way of his usage, like abstracting away the filesystem.
The elephant in the room is that Linux desktop environments did a better job of giving Linux users what they wanted when that's all they tried to do. Trying to give us what we didn't know we wanted has been a failure. Targeting non-techie users has gained us nothing that we didn't already want for ourselves. It's time for the community to get off its high horse about UIs and go back to what it's good at, which is humbly (and very successfully) catering to its own needs. And nobody should feel ashamed of creating or using an operating system that never eats Apple's or Microsoft's lunch (isn't that such a ten years ago obsession?)
(P.S. You know what's good at abstracting away the filesystem when and how it's appropriate? Applications.)
I agree that applications are good at abstracting away the filesystem which is why I would argue for a lighter weight OS (which I presume chrome OS is).
Now whenever there is an innovation, it is reviled and everyone asks for the interface which looked roughly like Windows 95.
So I guess they listened to the wrong messages.
In regards to remote resources, currently there are various FUSE plugins which can present remote resources in the filesystem (e.g. flickrfs). These are of course issues with the abstraction (how do we represent tags in a hierarchy?), but the use of these plugins is mostly transparent to the user (ignoring performance). It's certainly possible to build a layer atop of these that would integrate better with the system (e.g. add a Facebook selection to the open dialog).
You also seem to want to conflate applications with the data they manage. For a large number of users this is fine (iTunes is already their music, IE is the internet, etc), but for many others this is problematic (how do you manage moving data between these applications without a common intermediary. consider scanning an image, touching it up, then including it in a document - where do the original and altered versions live, how are they accessed by applications?).
Conflating data with applications is an interesting issue. On the one hand I feel that there may be a move towards this, for example it would be advantageous to (say) Apple for every photo you took on your iphone to be tied into the iCloud ecosystem never to escape.
On the other hand , storage is such a commodity that there's no reason that you couldn't hold your data where you want but hook into the functionality of a particular application to organise it.
For example maybe you use gmail to look through your archives of old emails that you had from a previous provider that are stored on your HDD. Spotify already does something like this with it's local music functionality.
I guess that's the true value of geek cred.
It's true that liking Gnome and/or Unity seems to have a kind of stigma these days.
You can do exactly the same thing: make your voice heard, state clearly and preferrably factually what you think is best for the free software stack. People will listen!
I've been using WindowMaker for 10 years. It's pretty perfect. No gimmicks. No unnecessary features. Lots of flexibility. Minimal. User friendly. Fast. Stable. It just works.
If someone has used Windows 95 before, a whole slew of operating systems after will be intuitive and a random user will know how to use it without instruction. They don't need anything more advanced. They just need it not to crash or bloat or change and become confusing. Most people just want shit to work.
"The latest Chrome OS release is only available for Samsung and Acer Chromebooks as Cr-48 Chromebooks will skip Chrome 19."
from http://googlesystem.blogspot.jp/2012/04/new-window-manager-f...
From the comments: http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2012/04/dev-channel...
To clarify, I don't think it's a coincidence and I think Google employees probably submitted these.
They were both worthy of submission IMO.
(The Douglas Crockford post more than this one though.)
If you look at the posters' profiles you can see where they both work. (Neither is currently a Google employee.)
Disappointing, although I'm happy to see progress towards an OS that treats web apps as first-class.
I see a lot of potential in a "drop": a personal cloud server installed at home, with the same user friendliness as e.g. google docs. Public data/services in the cloud, personal stuff at home. There still is enough opportunity to integrate mmoc? (massively multiple online collaboration?) into those apps. An example of this might be diaspora.
Many drops make a cloud, too.
I completely agree with his comparison to GTK3 (and I think the same applies to Unity). Forcing users into a singular workflow with limited options will always seem somewhat inhibiting, regardless of how "easy to use" the UI may seem. This crucial element is lacking from these modern Linux window managers.
"Today it decided to update itself to the new chrome version with the Aura window manager."
This will be a boon to the average user, as they'll have constantly up-to-date software, and security holes can get patched as quickly as they're found. That said, I would be concerned with things changing like that without my control, but I expect I'm in the minority.
Turning the desktop into a retarded terminal for some company's javascript apps is a bad idea, but some can't seem to grasp that.
the hardware is another story...they're great for light browsing and netflix...kinda.
If I recall correctly, Aura also serves as a real proper full window manager and already has support for Wayland too!