a little mans look at a big mans world

Google’s ChromeOS and Apple’s iPad are two products with the same goal in mind, the abstraction away of many cherished computing concepts. File systems and hierarchies, locations all these will be gone. However, they tackle this problem with two different approaches. Where they collide is going to be interesting, and, although neither product is officially released yet, the trends that they are setting and the ideas that they represent are indicative of the way computer consumables are going. Now, although these products are not officially released, I still have some thoughts about the approaches that they are taking. As I have used ChromiumOS (the dev community builds of ChromeOS) and I have an iPhone (to all intents and purposes a mini iPad), these speculations are not without at least some foundation.

ChromeOS

Google’s ChromeOS is an interesting beast. It shows its heritage throughout its ideas. Google wants you to do everything on the web, for many reasons, but probably one of the biggest reasons is so it can show you little text links which make Google billions of dollars a year. Every time you fire up Microsoft Word to write something, Google wishes you were on the web, looking at links. So, they set out to create a tool that would help people be on the web. Believe me, that is what ChromeOS is. It is a web tool, portal, whatever you would like to call it. My first install of ChromiumOS was before my wireless driver was really supported. I could do nothing at all without getting online.It was pretty annoying having to be tethered to my wired ethernet connection with my netbook, believe me! After some time, wireless was working, and I was free. Free to go about with my netbook, and access all the content that the web brings. Wow, it was fast, and nice. For browsing the internet, and some light word processing, the experience was perfect. Now, I am more willing than some to trust my data to the ‘cloud’, but if you can, it is a liberating feeling. Lightning fast boot-times combined with available anywhere data is very attractive. There is nothing else besides the browser. All the ‘apps’ for this are web applications. Now, you can do practically everything you would normally do in a day with web applications. There are still a few carry-overs from file systems, like looking at your saved files, etc. This is not a dealbreaker, certainly, and does not lift you out of your web experience too much.

iPad

The iPad is Apple’s take on this idea. To get a feel for what Apple is trying to do, you have to think about what they are trying to sell you. This is perhaps a more interesting task than analyzing what Google wants to sell you. Apple wants to sell an experience. They want to control that experience as much as they can. So they build the hardware, design the software, and sell the thing as one whole. Then they sell content on the thing. Music, TV, movies, apps, these are all part of Apple’s content delivery system. Guess what? Apple makes money on practically *every* piece of this puzzle. Let me pause for a minute, and then say that again. Every piece of this Apple experience is making money for Apple.  No wonder their revenues are so staggering. So, it is in Apples interest that they create a beautiful experience for you, because that is how they make their billions. So now they have a tablet experience. I have used an iPhone quite a bit, and as a go to device for casual browsing, I say it is capable. The most interesting question is how do they handle the abstraction of the computer metaphor? Very well. It is clean and precise. You know exactly what you are doing, and you don’t care where the data that supports your actions lives. It could be in the cloud, or it could be stored locally. The biggest drawback is not the delivery of the content, which is executed very well, but the speed of that delivery. The iPhone, compared to a regular computer, is *slow*. However, Apple seems to have addressed this, preliminary reports say that the iPad is very fast, for page requests and for apps. So this addresses the biggest issue. There will be many more productivity apps out for the iPad, as the increased screen real-estate makes it more attractive. It doesn’t have to be online, either. For the majority of tasks, you can work offline. There are lots of power tools available (like SSH) that simply cannot exist on the web. This is its strength. It will have to do some kind of multi-tasking eventually, or it won’t take off, but I am confident that that will come in an iteration.

Conclusions

So what does all this mean? There are some interesting things coming from these devices, to be sure. The ideas and the approaches both abstract away lots of the fluff that most people don’t care about anyway. Even I don’t really care, as long as it works. This means, in essence, that in the future, I won’t have to deal with lots of the stuff I don’t care about, like where my file is being saved to. There will be people (enthusiasts) who will not want to give up the level of control that they have over their computers, and they can continue to do as they please. They will become a minority. This is the direction that the smart companies are going, and my prediction is that consumers will love it.