Google recently showed off their upcoming ChromeOS and released parts of the project into open source.

ArsTechnica published a very good overview of what the OS does and does not offer. I certainly don’t even want to attempt to replicate their effort. The most interesting part about the ChromeOS is what it doesn’t do: to achieve its advantages in (startup) performance and security, it basically does away with your local file system. Like workstations running off servers of an era past, ChromeOS basically is said to be a thin-client for the “Cloud” and the Internet.

Now, the “Cloud” is a much abused term lately. Some good explanations of the concept can be found in There’s Grid in them thar Clouds and also another Ars article on clouds. For purposes of the ChromeOS discussion, it doesn’t really have much to do with the cloud. Unlike the cloud, which refers to a virtualized concept of computing and storage resources, ChromeOS really only needs your data to live in online services – whether they use any sort of cloud or not. It needs your data to live online because it doesn’t have a concept of ‘local’ files beyond some minimal requirements of the operating system itself.

Think of your desktop on your computer. Well, that’s a thing of the past in ChromeOS. Want to look at photos from your camera? You need to upload them to Flickr or Picassa first. Want to write a text document? Sure, in GoogleDocs or Microsoft Office online. You lose your Internet connection or are traveling on a plane? Your ChromeOS computer is pretty much useless. In this sense, the ChromeOS is pretty revolutionary. It anticipates a future approach to computing we have not become accustomed to yet. It also anticipates a future where we are plugged into broadband Internet 24/7. Like Apple removing the floppy from the iMac, this has drawn a lot of criticism. This is partially misplaced. ChromeOS is not meant for power-users. It’s not even meant for most casual users. It is conceived as a better way to browse the Internet on a secondary machine. I think it will fail in its initial proposition. It’s added value will come from forcing service providers to rethink the structure of data – making it more abstract, capable of living not just on the desktop but forcing the move to decentralized storage. The comfort with such a system isn’t here yet and the facilitating technologies have not yet been invented. But I think it will create more services like Dropbox and ultimately clear the way to a future where people will no longer miss the local desktop.

For now, ChromeOS trades a faster startup time and fewer local security issues for slower performance over the network (applications and data need to be loaded from the Internet, causing overall performance that is probably worse than today’s desktops) and security concerns about the ultimate storage of your data. But in a few years these issues will have been resolved and rendered moot when our access to the Internet is so fast that it approximates the speed of today’s local storage media. Then we won’t have to worry about whether we left a file on your laptop or work desktop. Wherever we access the Internet, our data will just be there. Where did your desktop go? It’s going to be everywhere!