Webspinner Tech Blog

I have the bug. It took me in the early evening and carried me through the next few days of heated investigation and discovery. Bouts of doubt and contemplation dotted a vast plain of consumption and digestion. Google had released its much awaited and touted open source project Chromium OS.

First I got my VirtualBox fired up and installed the image from gdgt and poked around feverishly to see what it was, what it does, and maybe most importantly why. This last point caught me unprepared. This was not my computing experience, this was not something I would use in 80% of my computer work as it is right now. I am a programmer, web application developer, graphic designer... how was I going to take advantage of this experience.

The reviewers had posted opinions ranging from the utopian to the disgusted. I was left baffled, reaching in the dark for answers and being forced to evaluate myself and my reliance on the PC experience of yore. What I soon discovered is that this was exactly what I had been wanting; for every other user in the world. It became clear to me that there has been a class based society sitting on the PC world from the beginning and google chrome set the lords and the vassals distinctly apart.

This new paradigm, the browsing experience model was brilliant for users eager to consume web applications, social networks and content. This is the PC for the masses. It is light, fast, and secure. You don't have to know what you don't know to stay protected and connected. This changes everything.

And where chrome is the village for the peasantry, the classic PC will become the Castles of the Land Owners. I see now a change for we the developers, the content providers, the makers of worlds that I have hoped for all my life. Where chrome lives on the cloud, the classic PC will become the cloud. The desktop PC must evolve into the server, the broadband connection no longer relegated to downloading but to serving up our constructions.

In turn this will result in services offering desktop like access to our castles via the chrome interface. Development will be done remotely on thin clients and compiled and published from any access point. Local will become a geographical statement once again and data will become simultaneously free and contained.

One immediately recognized reality is that linux is more suited for this transition than either Mac or Windows. The playing field will be leveled by this. Power users and creators will still get the castle of their preference, but they will act as beacons of power and community for the satellite chromebooks.

I also noted the number of people arguing against chrome for its absence of desktop applications, some for their graphics applications (photoshop), others for their business software. I use aviary.com now for most of my graphics work, and it works beautifully on chrome (though the screen resolution could do with a boost). Business software has been evolving rapidly online with big hitters like salesforce.com and microsoft bringing their applications to the ASP space. Maybe I am blind but I don't see the argument as very valid.

For me as a web application developer, the future is bright.