Austin Area Photo

The Google Chrome OS is betting many of the world’s computer users will let go of the internal hard drive security blanket and embrace the “Cloud”. Imagine that all of your photos, home movies, music, work and even financial information is all kept online. The “Cloud”, as it’s called, describes what a lot of us do already. Most of our time is spent on the net so why not save everything on the net. Now if my laptop is stolen, its not just the machine that was taken, it’s all of my information, my family photos, movies, financial docs, etc. that is also taken. However, if your computer was just the browser to interface with all of your content, all you lost was the laptop because all your files are kept online on secure servers. Replace your laptop and your back where you started, all pictures, movies, banking info, safe and sound. Think about it, we have online banking/retirement sites, social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and even YouTube, Pandora for music, medical sites like UNHC and BCBS all available at our disposal. Even Apple’s Mobile ME service give users access to 20GB of storage that can be retrieved from virtually anywhere. Making this really, not all that radical of an idea and as web browsers become more powerful, will we even need what we think of as a traditional operating system? About 15 years ago you would have needed a fairly good computer to handle a program like FarmVille on Facebook. Now, just about any web browser is more than capable of running this. So it’s not too far off that web browsers and internet connections will be strong enough to run graphic intensive games, Powerpoint, Photoshop or even video editing programs. In fact Google and others like Piknik already have online apps that are beginning to do just that. The first consumer net-books with Google Chrome OS pre-installed are expected later in 2010. Google Chrome OS is also open source, meaning free. I for one am looking forward to it.