Rabid Register Chromes at the Mouth
September 8, 2008 – 6:42 pmThere’s much to like about Ted Dziuba’s frothy rant in the Register, in which he takes the media to task for overhyping Google’s new Chrome browser. I wish I’d coined the brilliant term “Googasm”. He says “fuck” a lot, which makes a funny piece even funnier, at least for those with a solidly sophomoric sense of humor like me. And I almost peed myself when I read his comment on Henry Blodget (”Too bad the SEC can’t ban this guy from the tech industry for life”). Blodget has taken saying outrageously stupid things for a living to new heights and deserves all the collective abuse we blogger types can dish out.
But while I enjoyed Dziuba’s flippant tone, I disagree heartily with his thesis. His obsenity-laden diatribe shovels steaming piles of contempt on any and all claims that Google’s browser might be more than “a fucking browser”, and specifically, that it represents a threat to desktop operating systems like Windows. But is this idea really so monumentally stupid?
Granted, the pundits he excoriates are guilty of imprecise language. They fail to make the distinction between “operating system” in the sense of “low-level stuff that hooks my hardware up to my software” and “operating system” in the sense of “desktop graphical user interface”. The former is a more accurate technical description, but the latter is the meaning that likely resonates with most users. And with this clarification, the idea of the browser taking over the operating system’s role is eminently defensible.
Rather than gaze into his crystal ball, Dziuba’s eyes remained firmly glued to his rear-view mirror:
Given the thousands of Windows applications that are grandfathered in to many IT systems, the video games that are just a touch too GPU-intensive to run in JavaScript, and general user comfort with Windows, it’s hard to imagine a world where everything (and I mean everything) is done in a browser. Oh, and let’s not forget all your browser-based apps being ad-supported.
Kind of reminds me of Bill Gates’s infamous (and probably apocryphal) claim that no computer would ever need more than 640k. There are still plenty of legacy Windows apps out there, but companies are migrating to web applications in droves. JavaScript performance may still be an issue, but huge improvements have recently been achieved (by Adobe and Mozilla as well as Google), and once impossible-seeming browser-based apps are now commonplace. Google may be obsessed with ad revenues as the only way to finance browser-based apps, but plenty of other companies (Saleforce and Zimbra/Yahoo, to name just two) are successfully charging license and/or subscription fees. And don’t even get me started on “general user comfort with Windows.”
Naturally browsers are unlikely to ship with microkernels, device drivers and the like, so some sort of low-level operating system will still be needed. But with the plethora of modern Unix and Unix-like kernels out there, Windows doesn’t stand a chance in this market. The desktop GUI is a different story entirely, and improvements to the browser are making it increasingly plausible that it will one day be supplanted. Personally I don’t expect this to happen any time soon, but the notion is certainly compelling and worthy of thoughtful debate, not smart-alecky invective.
One Response to “Rabid Register Chromes at the Mouth”
I don’t think web apps will completely replace desktop ones any time soon, since there are still quite a few technical limitations on what they can do (such as any ability to reach outside the security sandbox). But they’re definitely on the increase - modern webmail clients are just as usable as their desktop counterparts, while apps like Google Calendar and Reader have for me replaced their desktop equivalents.
By Simon Geard on Sep 8, 2008