OMEN
12-14-2010, 11:26 PM
Not so shiny eh?
The creator of Google's AdSense technology and lead developer of Gmail reckons ChromeOS will be merged with Android or killed off within the next 12 months.
The prediction was posted to Paul Buchheit's FriendFeed account - FriendFeed being a Twitter-like service started by Mr Buchheit after his time at Google, and later sold to Facebook. In line with today's taciturn style the posting is characteristically brief:
"Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or 'merged' with Android)"
The poster feels no obligation to justify this conclusion, though it may not be particularly controversial when Android is doing so well, and looking so comfortable on the tablets where ChomeOS was expected to find a home.
Last time the world was singing the praises of thin computing (as it was then called), it was Sun's Java Station which was supposed to provide enough local processing to make cloud computing practical, there's some irony in Java powering the heavyweight client (Android) while local processing on cloud devices (ChromeOS) is falling to Java's adopted son JavaScript (or LiveScript as it was known last time around).
But ChromeOS does present a proper alternative to iOS on tablets, as opposed to Android which invites comparisons with Apple's OS at every turn. Being entirely cloud-based is different, but Google will have to decide if being different is enough to make ChromeOS worth investing in.
The Register
The creator of Google's AdSense technology and lead developer of Gmail reckons ChromeOS will be merged with Android or killed off within the next 12 months.
The prediction was posted to Paul Buchheit's FriendFeed account - FriendFeed being a Twitter-like service started by Mr Buchheit after his time at Google, and later sold to Facebook. In line with today's taciturn style the posting is characteristically brief:
"Prediction: ChromeOS will be killed next year (or 'merged' with Android)"
The poster feels no obligation to justify this conclusion, though it may not be particularly controversial when Android is doing so well, and looking so comfortable on the tablets where ChomeOS was expected to find a home.
Last time the world was singing the praises of thin computing (as it was then called), it was Sun's Java Station which was supposed to provide enough local processing to make cloud computing practical, there's some irony in Java powering the heavyweight client (Android) while local processing on cloud devices (ChromeOS) is falling to Java's adopted son JavaScript (or LiveScript as it was known last time around).
But ChromeOS does present a proper alternative to iOS on tablets, as opposed to Android which invites comparisons with Apple's OS at every turn. Being entirely cloud-based is different, but Google will have to decide if being different is enough to make ChromeOS worth investing in.
The Register