Google ChromeOS Notebook - Part 5

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Conclusion

I sat down with my new Cr-48 with one goal in mind…use it until I couldn’t. That is, try to see how much of my normal computing life I could handle just in a browser, just in the cloud. The answer, in the beginning was just not that much. That wasn’t a fault of the Cr-48, or of ChromeOS, but of my own predispositions and expectations about computing. As I mentioned in my Overview section, the metaphor of “just a browser” really took me some time to wrap my head around. Once I reworked my assumptions about how this computer-shaped-object was supposed to work, it became much easier to just Do Work on it.

And overall, I was able to get quite a lot done. I’m definitely on the early-adopter side of moving to the cloud: both of my books, all of my articles and blog posts (including this one), and pretty much every other piece of text I create lives in Google Docs until it has to go somewhere else. I sync my Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, and I use Gmail for my primary email address. So the move was much less difficult for me than for someone not already used to working in the cloud….for someone still tied to saving files locally, organizing folders, or use a lot of non–web based programs, this would be a very difficult computer to begin using.

The final grade for Google’s first attempt at a ChromeOS machine is quite a mixed bag. Here’s my breakdown:

Loved

• Nearly–instant on
• Ridiculously fast resume
• Keyboard
• Battery life

Didn’t Like

• LCD
• Resolution
• Rethinking my computing experience

Hated

• Trackpad

There is a lot of potential here, both for users and for Google. If ChromeOS becomes widely adopted, the benefits for users are huge: always having your computing environment with you, automagical syncing of all your data, better security, faster web experience. For libraries, if you aren’t providing a lot of customized software for your patrons, and the majority of their use is of the web browser, ChromeOS could solve a lot of your IT headaches. Even if you do need non-browser software, Google is working with Citrix to provide SaaS over the web in a variety of ways, and the potential for doing something with virtual machines over the web for those use-cases is becoming a reality. Google is betting big here, and as this technology matures, I’m not sure I’d bet against them. We’ll see what the next year brings, but ChromeOS is definitely something that libraries should be watching.