Google Chrome OS: Stating the Obvious

Stating the Obvious

When Google announced Chrome OS, the tech world exploded.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch promptly thanked himself for his own genius, Open Source Advocates and bloggers everywhere looked at Microsoft and Apple and predicted the death of desktop computing as we know it, and hosts and software companies everywhere rushed to release their own Cloud/OS/Storage Solutions in an effort to ride the free software wave. Even Walt Mosspuppet chimed in (probably, no, definitely NSFW).

What a lot of people lost in the hype was what Google OS actually was — Linux with a browser on top of it. As cool as it will undoubtedly be, we already have something very similar in an arguably more useful capacity. Namely, the VPS control panel, ala CPanel or Plesk.

When you sign up for a ServInt VPS, you’re getting a powerful Linux box with stable and tangible resources. It’s a very fast virtual machine — much quicker than most non-virtual machines — and it’s managed largely by a very intricate control panel, the two most popular options of which are Plesk and CPanel. Instead of using a browser to mess with the computer that is sitting in your lap, you’re using a browser to manage a computer potentially far more powerful than the one in your lap that could be thousands of miles away.  Plus, it’s going to get upgraded overtime, it will only get faster with technology, and it’s being managed by some of the most brilliant geeks in the world at ServInt.

Google Chrome OS was supposedly designed for use with netbooks, which aren’t particularly beefy machines, while control panels were designed for use with much more powerful virtual machines. If you need to encode video, you have to install an encoder in Chrome OS and presumably encode the video right there on the unit. With a control panel, you could install FFMpeg on a VPS, upload your video, and have the far superior resources of your VPS encode your video for you in a fraction of the time an Atom-powered netbook could all while you were doing other things (like watching other Walt Mosspuppet videos). Your only bottleneck is your internet connection.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of Google or those that are excited by the company’s entry into the world of OSes, it’s merely an invitation out of Google’s reality distortion field and into a larger conversation about the future of computing.

Chrome OS is no doubt going to push the idea of thin client/cloud computing even further. It’s particular flavor of Linux will be fast and sleek and I think that’s fantastic. But, its fundamental argument is that computing can be a remote endeavor, that the web is the real way to get work done and that it’s ok to outsource your CPU.

My point is that no one was really arguing against that. In fact, companies from ServInt to Microsoft and from Oracle to Canonical are all moving towards the complete outsourcing of the CPU. This is not the future, this is the status quo and if tech companies of all shapes and sizes ignore that they will simply cease to exist.

Kudos to Google for helping nudge computing towards where it needs to go, but this technology is already here.

You just have to realize you need it.

Photo used and altered under Creative Commons License, courtesy of flickr user damien78.