Is it time for Chrome OS?

2009 saw lot of new, useful and innovative products that resulted out of simple human dreams. The creators saw what the present [and the future] generation needed the most and put their ideas on the design table. We saw the release of several OSes by computing giants this year. Includes Windows 7, Google Chrome OS and Mac Snow Leopard. I am not including Ubuntu 9.10, because I believe that the October 2010 release  of Ubuntu shall defy all standards.

Because Google has been foraying into several new fields and many of my friends are Google fanatics, they asked me if it is OK to switch to Google Chrome OS.

My answer, “It ain’t the time”.

What the cloud has to offer as is software and even hardware as a service and over the internet. It offers to provide software and hardware as a pay by use model rather than permanently investing on it.

Yes, for people in countries like India it is not the right time to move onto Google Chrome OS. The most important reason for this belief of mine is the fact that Chrome OS is dependent on the cloud.

Cloud computing is the new talk of the town. Everyone wants to know about it and wants to use it.

Google Trends for "Cloud Computing"

See how people have searched for cloud computing on google? It started somewhere around October 2007, and kept rising with occasional peaks and falls. But I can observe a fall by the end of 2009. We will have to wait and see if the term continues to generate interest in 2010. Also, the largest number of searches were from India, especially from Bangalore [source: Google Trends]

From what I have understood, Chrome stores your data on the cloud. Your computers hard disk, stores the Operating System alone. Every other thing from software to storage space is provided over the internet. (Google Services cater to the softwares of the cloud and your data will be stored in your Google Account Space).

Though the term generated so much of interest in India, yet it is dependent on Internet speeds in India to become a feasible facility in Indian households. Till then we will have to buy our own Hardware, and Software (if you aren’t exactly an open source fan).

So we will have to wait for internet speeds to catch up for Google Chrome OS to become a plausible replacement. Even then the existing drawbacks of Cloud Computing (later on this), might just leave people with the option to use non cloud Operating Systems.

Technorati Tags: 2010, chrome, cloud, google, os, trends