A few weeks ago Google had their IO conference, which is their annual developers’ conference. The purpose of these conferences is to show off their latest and greatest products and try to get the people who are actually going to make software for the products excited and thinking. The reason why we care is it gives us some clues as to what might be coming soon to a consumer store near you soon. This year Google announced further development of their Chromebooks which are essentially netbooks constantly connected to the cloud. When I heard the offer I thought this was a big deal, but I talked it over with people and no one else felt the same tingle. This week Apple announced their iCloud service, and while people are heaping praise over what has essentially been available on every other mobile platform (seriously I’ve been able to do all but the music aspects on my now defunct but still functional windows mobile phone for a year now) I keep thinking back to how big a deal these Chromebooks are and how very soon our computers are going to be very different devices.
Four years ago netbooks began hitting the market and shook the PC world. Sony immediately announced they’d end up cannibalizing the laptop market. Apple denounced them as underpowered and useless. Meanwhile consumers bought them, a lot of them. The reason is simple, for twenty years we’ve been promised that our computers will be able to do more. We needed to buy a new computer every year because the new ones could do so much more than the older machines. Ironically, at least by my observations, computers have exceeded what we needed them to do about five years. Once raw horsepower wasn’t the primary selling point things like battery life and weight began to take center stage. The reason why ipads sell so well is because they do everything your laptop did five years ago but lasts all day.
This brings us back to the Google Chromebook. A computer without any internal storage, minimal processing power, and needs a web connection for almost everything. At first glance this looks like a computer nobody wants. However compare this to an ipad, sure there are people who have splurged and purchased the 64 GB model, but most people simply went for the 16 GB model, which with high resolution pictures and HD movies becomes a tiny amount of space in a short amount of time, not only that there are no options to increase the storage after purchase. Still people are using these instead of their laptops.
The problem with the ipad though is it is still too expensive to be a serious work horse to shake up the industry. The ipad starts at $499 for the most basic model, but add in the cost of the cover, a wireless keyboard, and 3g and you’re at about $750 dollars not including a data package. The Google Chromebook will be offered as a three year subscription for about $30 dollars a month that includes a data package. Most people wait at least three years before they consider upgrading their computers, and all but the most opulent companies wait that long as well. Seeing the Chromebook as more a competitor to the ipad and it starts to make a little more sense, particularly when you add the ipad’s icloud service.
Still neither the price nor the day long battery life made me consider the Chromebook a real game changer. In fact it’s the lack of internal storage that makes this device so appealing. Sure there are many locations across the country that still don’t have deep penetration of even broadband much less high speed wireless data, but that is more of a question about when that will happen not if. This means needing access to the internet will soon cease to be a limitation. As a result these devices can become premier data security devices. As is a lot of security breaches are a result of gaining access to the data on compromised computers. If the computers have nothing on them far less data is available to compromise.
People following tech news will quickly point out the security breaches at Sony and Lockhead Martin, and say the internet cloud is not a safe place. It is true there are vulnerabilities in cloud based storage, but I don’t see the risks as outweighing the potential gains. IT departments will have more control over the flow of data, they won’t need to worry about people losing sensitive information, and workers will have much more regular updates of their machines. We are witnessing a change in the computer world. Steve Jobs was right we are entering the post PC world and the cloud is what will make it happen.
1 comment:
While I think this is a great option for businesses who do not want any data stored on their actual devices, I still think the average person using these would want a way to store things without storing them in the cloud, at the potential vulnerability of others.
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