The State of the Web According to Web 2.0 In San Francisco

Last week, myself and Christian were in San Francisco for O’Reilly Media’s famous Web 2.0 Conference.

There were some really compelling keynotes, fascinating panels, and the show floor, while small, did its job of showcasing the current focus of the tech industry. What I found most interesting was the seemingly laser-like focus the entire tech industry seemed to have on three key development priorities, and Web 2.0 showcased them handily.

After four days there, I have a few take-aways that I think do a good job of summarizing where today’s developers see the future of the web.

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Google Chrome OS – Eating Words and Raising Eyebrows

“We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.”

- Marshall Mcluhan

Now that the hype has died down a bit, and now that I’ve had a chance to play with very early builds of Chrome OS myself, there are some interesting questions about the new OS that arise as they pertain to the web, and to web hosting in particular. I’ll start by saying this, what Google is doing through Chrome OS will eventually change the way we use computers forever. Bold statement, I know, but here’s my take.

For those who aren’t knee deep in the geeky tech news world, Chrome OS is a new operating system by Google. The premise behind the open-source project is simple, it’s an extremely light-weight operating system that is nothing more than a web browser on top of Linux.

Its file system would be largely inaccessible to the user, its applications would be web based, and again the actual OS would be the Chrome web browser itself. Your documents and preferences would primarily be stored online by Google, in “the cloud” (take a drink), so that if your device were ever lost your data could easily sync back to a new device or to a different computer. By eliminating the distinction between a web browser and an operating system, Google is banking on the idea that most people only use their companion computers to surf the web.

More after the jump…

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Google Chrome OS: 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.