Absolutely moronic. The press is going ga-ga because they have nothing else to write about and Michael Jackson, thankfully, is off the Tech press radar.

When you think about it the computer industry is as cyclical as any other industry. Old technology gets dusted off (serial connectivity) and promoted as the next BIG thing. We’re now back to the dumb terminal/thin client era under a new name (cloud computing).

In order to sell us on this the tech industry has to convince consumers that the managing of files locally is “just too hard” and they should allow Google and 50 other vendors to swoop in and manage things …for a fee.

99 % of the press doesn’t even know what Chrome OS can do yet they want to “inform” me with threat assessments? That’s like a man with sight buying a blind dog for guidance.

Change has to start somewhere. Building the OS is just a step. The 3rd party apps will come, especially if enough people use it. Look at Apple… the company has hovered around the bottom of the market share statistics for years, but 3rd party apps were/are still being developed for it.

Should Apple and Microsoft (and other OS vendors) be scared, well maybe not scared, but they should be looking at it with interest. The “thin” client idea has been kicking around for years. For business I think it makes great sense… but for home use, not so much at this point.

To address the security concerns of Cloud computing… There certainly are concerns. But I already trust my email to my hosting company (IMAP). I trust that my hard drives won’t fail (and the back up drives). I trust that the power company keeps the juice coming to my house. So as security and trust issues arrive, companies will figure out how to solve them.

I like the idea of a new OS from Google. Though I may never end up using it.

Let’s say that Google figures a way of getting around each and every one of Gene’s objections about the feasiblity of their announced OS scheme (although I wouldn’t hold my breath until that happens) and came up with a viable system. I’d still have a serious problem with using this. I presume that the Google OS system would require users to store their data in the Cloud (for a fee, right?) rather than locally. At least a lot of what I’ve read over the past few days assumes this, although I’m not sure Google has made this completely clear yet. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is so. In that case, it’s not “the Cloud”, as we often casually say, it’s a particular Cloud owned and operated by a particular corporation. So, if we are being invited to entrust our data to any corporation’s Cloud, we need to ask how trustworthy that particular corporation is, when it comes to\t maintaining security and respecting individual privacy. I have no trouble entrusting some reasonably confidential data (my address book, e-mail and so forth) to Apple’s Mobile Me, because I have no reason not to trust Apple in this respect. I also have a lot of data parked on one of those commercial offsite backup outfits, and I trust them too. So I don’t think anybody can accuse me of being unduly paranoiac. But a lot of questions have been raised about Google’s respect for user privacy when it comes to ther use of their search engine, data mining of G-Mail, and so forth, and also their respect for intellectual property rights (regarding copyrights of some of the items in Google Books). They don’t have the best track record in the world, it would seem. So I’d require a helluva lot of convincing before I entrusted my data to this particular corporation. And if a small-time individual user feels this way, imagine how a large corporation with trade secrets and other truly sensitive data to protect is going to react to this proposal!