Chrome OS for the clueless: What it means for real people

Early this week, Google, the company that became a tech giant through search and advertising company, announced that it's branching out into an unrelated direction, the operating system business. It will release the Chrome OS next year, a free competitor to Microsoft's Windows operating system. It will be targeted at Netbooks, a class of small, inexpensive computers, although eventually it will make its way to full-powered notebooks and desktop computers. It will be designed for accessing Web applications (such as Google's own Gmail and Google Docs), and it will take a lot of design and technology cues, as well as its name, from Google's browser, Chrome.

What does this mean to people who are thinking about buying a new computer now, or next year? Is the Chrome OS something to get excited about, or even wait for?

We won't know for sure what the operating system looks like until it comes out, which answers the second question handily: Do not wait. If you need a new computer now, spend the money and get the use out of the machine while Google figures out how and when to get the Chrome OS out the door.

But to the other question: Yes, this is very interesting, and potentially could cause some transformations in the computer industry, although they may be more subtle than Google--and Microsoft's detractors--hope.

Who cares about operating systems?
Computers need operating systems. Even computers that do nothing but run Web browsers need one. An application like a Web browser--Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome--needs to run on top of a platform that gives it access to the hardware resources of the computer (the memory, the persistent storage. The app also needs access to the networking and communications hardware, the screen, the keyboard, and so on); to peripherals plugged into a computer (printers, cameras that connect, memory cards); to the other software on the computer (like the system for storing files); and lastly, to you, the user.

Or do they? What if you combined the operating system's functions with a browser's functions, which include accessing and displaying Web pages, keeping track of bookmarks and passwords, and connecting to computer-attached resources like Webcams?

Google is answering that question with Chrome OS. Google is saying, with this product that the modern computer user spends so much time working with Web-based resources that the main control system for the computer should be the browser, not the operating system. Furthermore, Google sources tell us that the Chrome OS experience will bear little resemblance to the existing way that users interact with their computer's main control program. A person familiar with the Chrome OS project told us:"All existing operating systems predate the Web, and the user interfaces are stuck in a desktop metaphor." The Chrome OS, we're led to believe, will be very different.

How? We don't know. It's a safe bet that the Chrome OS will lean more heavily on so-called "cloud storage" products--like Google's own productivity suites, Google Docs--that let users store their data and documents not on their computers but rather on the systems of the Web apps they are running. The great thing about cloud storage is that it's untethered to any individual user's computer. Log in to your Google Docs account from anywhere, and there's your whole workspace, right in front of you. It's liberating.

Google may also take a cue from its own email application, Gmail, which blends the traditional idea of having folders for email with the concept of "labels". In Gmail, you can drag messages into folders to file them, or you can drag folders (or labels) over messages to categorize them. It's the same thing, but the hierarchy people are used to in operating systems, where a file is in one folder at a time, and the folder may be nested in another folder, is simply not there. Folders and labels are interchangeable and far more fluid.

But in Windows 7, Microsoft's next operating system, Folders are also less rigid than they've been in previous versions of Windows.

We can also expect that the Chrome OS will borrow user interface elements from Chrome the browser--such as a tabbed metaphor for switching between "apps" and the mind-reading command line (address bar in the browser). It may also evidence Google's traditional obsession with clean (if not necessarily attractive) design and speed. The Chrome OS should be fast.