Today I had used Google's Chrome Web Store for the first time and I had an epiphany. I suddenly understood, why Chrome, the web store, and the Chrome OS is actually a rather big deal.
Here's the future, as I saw this morning.
The web (ie. Javascript + DOM) will be THE runtime for software. For the most part, as web services, but with some applications still running locally as extensions or chrome web store 'applications'.
The latter will be more prevalent where local caching of assets and volatile data is necessary to match the performance of existing native applications for frequent use. The boundary between the two will be blurry and for the most part abstract to the end user.
You might for example, visit Google Docs to work on a program, which will take advantage of a local helper application on your machine to make sure the whole thing loads quickly and is stable even over a transient internet connection. It will do so in a private sandbox isolated from the rest of your data, and you may well not even be told it's happening. After all you don't really care, you just want to get to your doc.
But even with such edge-caching, storage of application data and user preferences/credentials will always be hosted off site. This means that you can lose or wipe your machine, and the only delay to being fully back up and running is the time taken to refresh your 'cache'.
And in this world, a web browser is the only actual program on your desktop you'll ever need.
Sounds crazy? You'd be hard pressed today to find a major tech company that doesn't have a web delivery strategy of some kind. Microsoft Office is becoming Microsoft Office Live. Skype is widely expected to have a web based version from 2011. Adobe's product suite is becoming increasingly web-based, and HTML5 at that.
Chrome is a stepping stone in the transition to this state. It starts as just a tool for looking at HTML, but increasingly becomes a runtime for everything a user needs. Case in point, I've just installed the Tweetdeck web store app, and deleted Echofon from my desktop. At a not too distant point in the future, I won't need Office anymore. I probably don't need Apple Mail or Yammer right now.
As people start to reach this point in the next few years, they will need to ask themselves if they really need a traditional OS at all, or if they wouldn't be better off with something like Chrome OS that literally just runs Chrome. After all, it would be nice to have faster boot times, super secure access, few-to-no IT admin headaches, no licensing fees, no backups, and complete crash recovery? For most people, who aren't buried in hard-core desktop tools like ray-tracers or IDEs, this would actually be pretty nice right?
It's especially true in the Enterprise - the driver being the significantly reduced IT cost. Not only would there be way less support needed but the hardware would be cheaper and more standardised too. Hell my old employer could shift most of it's employees to Chrome OS today if it were stable enough, and save a ton of money and hassle in the process. Everything they do is web based anyway.
If none of that made any sense, spend a minute watching this. The Epihheo guys explain it much better than I can:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwVX42Amcak
Anyway, back to the vision. To get to this state, in the short term a bunch of things that are good need to be better. Chrome is fast, but it needs to be faster. And more stable. For developers, you really need to tool up to build desktop-grade apps in the browser. Forget jQuery, you need something like GWT. Not surprisingly, Google is leading the charge here too. Now you know why.
And in the long term - like any architecture transition, it will take a while. For many orgs, a LONG while, while legacy cruft remains that can't cost-effectively be 'ported' to the web. And for those of us running specialised tools it may never happen entirely, but it is a logical transition because of the user benefits and cost reduction.
It's effectively a return to a thin client architecture that puts the web front and centre.
Platform plays are nothing new, but the really surprising thing is that Google's aim here doesn't seem to be platform dominance (unlike Microsoft with Windows, or Apple with iOS), but rather disruption - preventing any other player from 'owing the screen' of the devices users use to access Google's services (and thereby block them).
I think this explains why they picked the web as the ideal runtime. It's an appalling choice in many respects - it was never designed to support rich applications, but every OS and smartphone has to support it to stay relevant - they are trapped into tacitly supporting Google's platform of choice. It's also why Google can afford to go open source on Chromium - since its not about vendor lock-in, its fine if Novell or whoever decide to clone it and tweak it for their own purposes. That being said, I've no doubt Google will achieve significant market penetration in many workplaces and households.
They don't need to win in the sense of making tons of money or having Chrome OS on every device, they just need to do well enough that the web remains a first class citizen, another player can't own the whole market and block their services. In this, I think they'll succeed.
I suspect this strategy has been obvious to many for a while, but today I suddenly 'got' it. And I have to admit it's actually quite well thought out and rather elegant.
The 'Web Store' is something of a last minute addition to this strategy, but a logical one and entirely consistent. And it will do very well for Google, and will hopefully side-step the closed-garden. And where the hell does Android sit in all of this? Did Palm have the right idea all along with WebOS? (Answer: No.) But that will have to be the subject of another post.
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