"Nothing but the web"??

How can you be so tantalizingly close to such a glorious tagline as "Nothing but net" and not use it?

AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Has our collective taste improved since then? It often seems that way.

This is the form linked from the above site: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48advanced/

And the form linked from within Chrome's new tab page: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic/

Edit: Also amusing, one of the options for "Which program do you use to listen to music most often?" is "Dude with a guitar on the corner."

We'll see what happens. :)

> I understand that Google will only ship the device to a US-based address and cannot send this device to a P.O. Box or address outside of the US.

http://www.google.com/chromeos/pilot-program-forbusiness.htm...

I think Google is far more ambitious in the business space than most people realize. They are aiming directly at Microsoft's empire. Consider the amazing TCO for a business that deploys only Google Apps and ChromeOS notebooks to its employees. Obviously, Google Apps are not quite good enough yet, but Google knows this is a long term project. The apps are constantly improving and at the same time people are steadily migrating to the web for many of their workflows anyway. At some point it'll get really hard to justify spending $1-2k up front plus IT overheads per employee when you could get it for virtually nothing with a ChromeOS notebook.

Oops.

I realized that Emacs is the Chrome OS, except with 25 years of libraries and applications to show for it.

I use the web for visiting websites, but that's only a very small part of my day. Most everything I do for fun or socialization or for creative purposes I do without the web. I may publish my stuff to the web, but it's a medium, not a tool. A painter wouldn't say he spends a lot of time working with magazines, even if most people know his paintings from one.

Anyway, I'm not criticizing the idea of Chrome OS. Like I said, Chrome is basically a pretty Emacs, which is a great environment. But it won't work for me today.

(Would I buy a Chrome OS tablet, just for reading random crap on the web? You bet! But I wouldn't commit to using one as my primary computer, because I wouldn't be able to do anything I want to do.)

And why on earth do I want to give Google so much control of my OS? And full control of my laptop? Maybe I should just give bots from outer space full control of my workspace.

See. I just shared some opinions. Feel free to share your own.

Our opinions also amount to reviews. This is a new product, and we're speculating about how we would review it had we tried it.

Maybe emacs loses this round...

Atleast my 1.5 yr old Sony VAIO has a Web button, which boots the system to slightly stripped down version of Firefox without booting OS. Its also very fast, boots in 10-20 seconds and runs flash content too.

Even better way is try installing Arch Linux, you only get what you install.

3G service from most any carrier that I've tried is barely adequate for surfing the web on my Android cell phone. I would hate to have to rely on 3G service for all external storage for my computer.

I don't see how eliminating local storage on my computer and putting all my data on Google's servers is better than having access to that data locally. Random access to an SSD is 10^(3-4) ns, a random seek on disks with spindles is 10^(6-7)ns and a packet sent round trip across the country is 10^(8-9)ns.

I can buy a 16GB flash drive at Frys for $15. When local storage is so ubiquitous and cheap, I don't understand why would you want to develop an OS that relied on packet transfer for permanent storage rather than local storage with delayed synchronization.

It's not like having local permanent storage is much of a hindrance. I've never said, "Damn, if I could only get rid of 60GB of local storage on my computer, every thing would be great". I do find myself cursing my lack of network coverage on a regular basis, however.

I suppose that it makes sense if you are Google and you want as much of people's data on your servers so you can money by mining that data. Aside from that, I just don't get it.

When did PC software become legacy?

I've seen the same thing happen with code internally - a developer writes an untested replacement for a component and then instantly declares the old version "legacy", even though it still works fine.

"Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers." — Marc Andreessen (1995)

I still like to run a lot more desktop apps and some things are just not there as a webapp, or certainly not as tweakable. But I can give Google that much, I'm perhaps not their target audience. Which is also fine by me. What I'm worried about is the mom-pop people who will use it in the appropriate fashion, will have young kids also using them. I don't want to sound like the old guard here and I'm happy to see Google making real progress in making computing for everyone, but there is something about running my first Basic program on my parent's computer or accidentally fdisk'ing the whole thing, that I hope the nextgen of geeks don't get to miss out on. With wording such as 'legacy software', I just hope they somehow come to tinker with the OS too rather than just seeing better webapps.

I think the pilot program is about right for something as bold as how they're marketing this. Putting as many of these in the hands of the very people they're pissing at and saying "ok, you tell us then" is the only way to change some minds. If they don't ship 100,000 of these to smart people, I can't see it taking off.

The marketing is horrendous otherwise. A new sort of web based platform? I get that, I'm ok with that. A new sort of product that has marketing materials telling me my opinions are bullhookey and a PM that wants to see me out of a job is another.

Don't worry, they will become cool again for chrome OS in another year or so.

[oops, copied the wrong date from wikipedia. you get the idea...]

The final question is, "If selected, will you use this Chrome notebook as your primary computer and provide regular feedback?" This should have been the first question so people didn't have to waste their time filling out the survey if they won't use the machine as their #1 machine.

How many developers would use a Chrome OS netbook as their primary computer? A secondary computer (think tablet) sure, but for doing their day-to-day coding?

I've used a tiny Viao (pre-netbook era) as a main (home) development machine, but that had a full Linux OS and was unusual.

Other issues:

- Have to provide a US state even for people outside of the US

- Item labeled "Primary Email" with a note, "If you have a Gmail address, please supply that."

- Can only answer once to, "Which OS do you use most of the time?" (How about people who use two OSes equally?)

- Similar problem for, "Which web browser do you use most of the time?". (Different browsers on different computers? Using multiple main browers at the same time?)

- "What type of device do you use most frequently?" Again, only one answer. (I use laptop, desktop and ipad extensively)

- "How do you check your email most often?" single option. (How about people who, you know, check both work and personal email?)

- "Which apps or tools do you use at least once a week?". It names specific applications. Hard to tell if "Adobe Reader" is meant as a proxy for "PDF Viewer" or not.

- "How do you connect to the Internet most often?" only a single answer...

- (snip: other questions with only single answers that should allow multiple)

Boom, right here. That said, they might send you one even if you don't use it as the #1.

Also, I think your form was borked. There were several things you encountered that I didn't.

Seriously, Google?

Sad faces for people in the UK.

And, for a lot of people, security is a concern, but in the background. A fly buzzing by the screen door, but not something that would keep them from taking an easy option from a company that 'knows the answer to everything'.

So, for most people, what's not to like?

It's rather confusing though; why have a country drop-down if it's only open to US residents?

They've got a system for chat windows and notifications to show up on top of the main window, and they've got a full-screen button to hide all the window decorations. The only real use a more complex window manager would have is enabling you to show two documents side by side, but I doubt that the horizontal screen resolution is high enough for that to work with most web apps.

If "the cloud" starts to tread on more serious territory and people reach the point where they're willing an able to do things on the web that they would previously use a $1000+ computer for, then Google will have to revisit Chrome OS's basic paradigm. But until then, the main purpose for Chrome OS is to make a true netbook.

The Windows Start Bar, the OSX dock, the OSX dashboard are all much nicer methods for managing apps than how ChromeOS appears to do it, and they've all been around for years. Google should have come up with something better than these for ChromeOS, not worse.

Check, wait, no, uncheck.

In all instances, the ChromeOS team members reiterated that from the very first day, their vision was to address the notebook form factor, because they're attempting to build a platform that can be used as their own primary device.

How else can you get people to fill out a survey?