why do I bother?

. . . writing a post about Google's plans to build their own OS, when I could have just waited for Fake Steve:

Point four: You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really? And you know why nobody uses Chrome? Because Chrome is shit. Just utter, utter shit. I mean they've got all these big brains at Google and you'd think they could make a decent f***ing browser. Jesus, the morons at Mozilla can do it. But not Google. Nope. They gave it their big best effort and what did they come up with? Chrome. It's a joke. I mean, literally, we laugh about it, except when Eric is around. But as soon as he leaves the room we all go "Chrome!" and just burst out laughing. Our guys on the Safari team even had special toilet paper made up with a Chrome logo on every sheet. That's how bad it is. Trying to make an OS out of Chrome is like saying you're going to turn a Pontiac Aztek into a stretch limousine. I suppose it could be done, but why?

Google's OS future

There are already a great many blog posts on Google’s announcement of its operating-system-in-progress; probably the most interesting one I’ve seen so far is from John Timmer at Ars Technica. Sample:

From a technological perspective, there appear to be some interesting aspects to rethinking the operating system. For one, by having an extremely narrow focus—bringing up a networking stack and browser as quickly as possible—Chrome OS has the ability to cut down on the hassles related to restarting and hibernating computers. And, aside from the browser, all of the key applications will reside online, security and other software updates won't happen on the computer itself, which should also improve the user experience. . . .

More cryptically, Google also says that the users it views as its target market "don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware." That problem has plagued all OS makers, and none of them have solved it to the satisfaction of all users. It's possible that Google thinks it can do so, but given its general attitude (everyone should be happy with Web apps), it's equally possible that the company has decided that people simply don't need much in the way of peripherals.

And then near the end:

Will all of this work? Apple spent a couple of years trying to convince developers that they should be happy with Web apps, but it's clear that the arrival of native applications has been a significant driver of the iPhone's popularity. Palm appears to be trying something closer to Google's vision with the Pre, but Palm is also offering a native SDK, and it's too early to tell how well its reliance on online services will work out for users. At this stage, it's not even clear if the netbook market will have staying power once the economy picks back up.

We’ve seen already the convenience of web apps — access to the same data from anywhere you have am internet connection, and “pushed” upgrades that “just happen” — and we’ve seen some of the problems: catastrophic data loss (e.g. the ma.gnolia disaster), privacy concerns, lack of offline access, the limited feature sets of web apps in comparison to their desktop counterparts. Google’s approach to these problems seems to be to reassure us about the first, hope that we ignore the second, fix the third, and hope that convenience trumps the fourth. My guess is that ultimately they will succeed in all these endeavors, at least for a great many consumers.