I got tons of e-mail and messages about this and people asked me my opinion. As you guys know Google is making Chrome OS available for older PC's and Macs through a new OS they call Chrome OS Flex and thats good for them. Its based on CloudReady made by a company called Neverware that they purchased a couple of years ago. CloudReady is going away and my thoughts on that is that this opens up the market. What do I mean by that? Chrome OS Flex has one of two ways it can go and we will talk about that in a second. In the meantime I have downloaded Flex and it is nice. Its really a good attempt. If you want to browse the web and watch YouTube its a perfect solution. If you are a developer or tinkerer you are shit out of luck. You cant access the command line at all, Shell Access has been removed. Android app support is not there yet IF ever and if your PC is older than 2 years you cant run Crostini and without shell access ChromeBrew is gone so once again this has one of two ways this can go. If they bring Android apps to Flex, if they enable some kind of developer mode yeah it has the potential to be a bullet in the head of desktop Linux distributions. If they dont, and I dont think they will because Google cant do basic math, and they stay on the current path they are on. Well, Flex will fail and will wind up in the Google Graveyard of what could have been within a year or two because Google is a company that likes to shoot itself in the foot, repeatedly until it cries for mommy. Google has had opportunity after opportunity to get ahead in everything but its core markets and hasn't and that is because they like to blow off their own toes which is why almost NONE of their past projects ever got past ad revenue, browsers and search. My bet is Google graveyard in 12 months. Google is its own worst enemy and its going to torture itself and then come to the realization it failed. Google has basically delivered to us Chrome OS 2009. Sorry guys the industry and users decided that that was NOT ENOUGH. Thats why Neverware never really caught hold with developers and why even its users didnt standardize on it. We run parallel with Neverware in many of our school systems. They used Neverware on a lot of their throw away old laptops so if a kid didnt return it at the end of the year or the systems got stolen it was not a huge loss. Now for those of you who are tech savvy you can get into the command line environment by configuring GRUB and if you dont know what that is Im not going to tell you because you can fuck things up BIG TIME.
Google has missed the general rule of software and product development. Listen to your users. Google gives its customers what Google wants and then gives their customers the middle finger and that is why they fail in everything BUT search. But, I think you will see a ton of downloads by people who are curious and people will want to use this thing for grandma and Stacy's mom who do nothing but check e-mail, do banking, general web browsing and watch YouTube and Netflix but for your broader tech consumer they are going to see very quickly how totally fucking useless this thing is in its current incarnation and reinstall Windows just like they did with CloudReady. Bring Android and developer mode, watch this thing become the brightest star in the tech industry. Make it CloudReady 2.0 and watch it crash and burn in a spectacular fashion. Some of us will have fun with that everyone loves a trainwreck. But based on Googles past performance in moving beyond its core market, Im not optimistic.
Those are my thoughts everyone have a nice day!!!
