So on the way to work this morning I was listening to this weeks edition of the TWiT networks "This Week In Google" podcast, which of course was covering the Google IO announcements.
I was surprised to hear the glitterati of the show still doing the whole "I don't get the need for Chrome, why wouldn't you do Android....." stuff, again........
I have already given my take on Chrome for Enterprise in a number of postings, but try out this one:
Google Chrome OS - think Enterprise
So reading the coverage of IO on Engadget, it appears I was on the right track ! Google is offering 3 year contracts or "subscriptions" for the new Samsung and Acer "Chromebooks" for as low as $28 a month. This is exactly where I always thought this was heading.
Check out the Engadget article here: "Editorial: Google clarifies Chromebook subscriptions, might just have changed the industry"
We will see where this goes and how successful it might be, but for now, smug smile from me :-)
Showing posts with label Google Chrome OS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Chrome OS. Show all posts
Friday, 13 May 2011
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Google ChromeOS, ECM and intranets - UPDATE
Update: I write this, go for lunch, come back and pull this out of my RSS reader: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/12/nothing-but-web.html
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So there has been a little written in the last week or so about Google's ChromeOS - a lot of it complete drivel in my opinion, and as this is my blog, I think I am entitled to expose my opinions.
I am not going to point to lots of articles or podcasts discussing ChromeOS - you can Google it :-)
I would however characterise a lot of the discussions I have read as being heavily US centric, and very consumer oriented. Well I live in North America and Google is a U.S. company, and the CR48 notebooks are only available in the U.S. (as far as I know), so one would expect the coverage to be U.S. centric. This leads to a few problems though. A lot of the 'critique' of ChromeOS that I have read seems to be written by really rabid Microsoft fan boys. They concentrate on how the world is not ready for an always on, cloud enabled, light weight (in all senses of the term) computing paradigm. They wail about Google taking over their lives and dashing their privacy against the rocks of its always analysing servers....... Get real people !
I bet most of these idiots have Facebook accounts, and I would be way more worried about privacy where it comes to that company. They moan about the single employee who abused his system privileges - he was caught and fired ! I could go on, but lets just remind all those numbskulls which company is actually a convicted monopolist in the U.S.........
ChromeOS for consumers
Perhaps more to the point for a European living in North America is the dichotomy of the existence of the centre of gravity for the worlds IT industry (silicon valley) in a totally backwards market for connectivity. For historical (or maybe hysterical) reasons, the U.S. and Canadian telecoms industry just gouges consumers at every chance it gets - and gets away with it. Whether thats cable TV, home internet, or cell phones, you pay a lot more for a lot crappier service over here than you do in Europe, and although I accept all the arguments about bigger land areas and less dense populations - these excuses are getting tired now.
Bringing it back to ChromeOS, it's detractors complain about the lack of ubiquitous, cheap mobile data connectivity - well my point being that is not Google's fault, and I can see the CR48 or other devices doing just fine for consumers in Europe, if not over here. In fact I know that as long as there is going to be Skype client available, and some Linux based equivalent of iTunes to manage his music, my 76 year father would be way better off with a simple ChromeOS device than his Windows Vista machine.
The corporate angle
However I, and a few others apparently, think that the real market for ChromeOS machines is the corporate world. ChromeOS is, at its base just a simplified desktop variant of Linux. It has been developed to run a browser in a highly secure sandboxed environment. How is this starting to sound to any of you who manage thousands of enterprise Windows machines ?
Yes, yes, I know, the whole concept is as old a Babage himself (well maybe not that old) but mainframe terminals evolved into 'thin clients' and then Larry Elison's "Network Computer", and perhaps now, as cloud computing becomes mature, the time is right for a "thin client" in the shape of a ChromeOS machine. There will be packaged apps for ChromeOS, i.e. those that will run off line - but (finally !) lets examine the ECM and intranets aspect of things.
Just about everything I need to do for my work, I do through a web browser. OK, yes I use local MS Office tools, including InfoPath, and Visio - but I have a semi-technical role, otherwise I live in SharePoint sites and other online tools and services available via our global intranet. How many "knowledge workers" could live with Office 365 (the fully cloud version of Office) and do just fine ? Don't want to go to a fully "outside the firewall" cloud model, how about Office 2010 "online" version served up via your SharePoint 2010 installation.
Internal or external clouds?
All the ECM products worth a dime have web interfaces. So do the ERP suites and many (if not most) other classes of major applications. I am not impressed by the arguments that users who are used to PC's want to be able to set their wallpaper and listen to their music - ever heard of Last.fm ? Also are we not constantly informed that Millennial's will not come and work for us if they can't have Facebook and Twitter access? So have we not already passed the boundary from "my desktop" to "my web access" within the workplace ??
So you don't have to buy into the full Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps world view to make the most of your ChromeOS machine, but if your an SMB / SME why not ?
Perhaps you could go the whole hog and ditch your Intranet 1.0 efforts and go offsite / cloud with a hosted intranet solution from the likes of Sosius or Vialects Noodle (good products IMHO).
So I can see the ChromeOS having a much bigger impact on the corporate world than the consumer one. This might require the CMS companies to put effort into HTML 5 and to speed up the release cycle for the next revamp of their interfaces.
However if Google want ChromeOS thin clients to break into them into the enterprise, they need to put in a lot more effort. Their (lack) of support to Enterprise Apps customers is almost legendary. As I have noted before I would really like to see them create "computing appliances" for companies to put into their data centres to build their private cloud infrastructures - GMail boxes, Google Apps boxes and Google Voice boxes to sit in the rack next to the Google Search Appliances. What this would need though is a full support organisation, with the correct corporate mindset - mind you even if they just pushed their full cloud based services through the corporate firewall they would still need this. So perhaps they should get out their wallets and buy an enterprise consulting firm ?
In summary - Google ChromeOS - it's all about the enterprise stupid !
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So there has been a little written in the last week or so about Google's ChromeOS - a lot of it complete drivel in my opinion, and as this is my blog, I think I am entitled to expose my opinions.
I am not going to point to lots of articles or podcasts discussing ChromeOS - you can Google it :-)
I would however characterise a lot of the discussions I have read as being heavily US centric, and very consumer oriented. Well I live in North America and Google is a U.S. company, and the CR48 notebooks are only available in the U.S. (as far as I know), so one would expect the coverage to be U.S. centric. This leads to a few problems though. A lot of the 'critique' of ChromeOS that I have read seems to be written by really rabid Microsoft fan boys. They concentrate on how the world is not ready for an always on, cloud enabled, light weight (in all senses of the term) computing paradigm. They wail about Google taking over their lives and dashing their privacy against the rocks of its always analysing servers....... Get real people !
I bet most of these idiots have Facebook accounts, and I would be way more worried about privacy where it comes to that company. They moan about the single employee who abused his system privileges - he was caught and fired ! I could go on, but lets just remind all those numbskulls which company is actually a convicted monopolist in the U.S.........
ChromeOS for consumers
Perhaps more to the point for a European living in North America is the dichotomy of the existence of the centre of gravity for the worlds IT industry (silicon valley) in a totally backwards market for connectivity. For historical (or maybe hysterical) reasons, the U.S. and Canadian telecoms industry just gouges consumers at every chance it gets - and gets away with it. Whether thats cable TV, home internet, or cell phones, you pay a lot more for a lot crappier service over here than you do in Europe, and although I accept all the arguments about bigger land areas and less dense populations - these excuses are getting tired now.
Bringing it back to ChromeOS, it's detractors complain about the lack of ubiquitous, cheap mobile data connectivity - well my point being that is not Google's fault, and I can see the CR48 or other devices doing just fine for consumers in Europe, if not over here. In fact I know that as long as there is going to be Skype client available, and some Linux based equivalent of iTunes to manage his music, my 76 year father would be way better off with a simple ChromeOS device than his Windows Vista machine.
The corporate angle
However I, and a few others apparently, think that the real market for ChromeOS machines is the corporate world. ChromeOS is, at its base just a simplified desktop variant of Linux. It has been developed to run a browser in a highly secure sandboxed environment. How is this starting to sound to any of you who manage thousands of enterprise Windows machines ?
Yes, yes, I know, the whole concept is as old a Babage himself (well maybe not that old) but mainframe terminals evolved into 'thin clients' and then Larry Elison's "Network Computer", and perhaps now, as cloud computing becomes mature, the time is right for a "thin client" in the shape of a ChromeOS machine. There will be packaged apps for ChromeOS, i.e. those that will run off line - but (finally !) lets examine the ECM and intranets aspect of things.
Just about everything I need to do for my work, I do through a web browser. OK, yes I use local MS Office tools, including InfoPath, and Visio - but I have a semi-technical role, otherwise I live in SharePoint sites and other online tools and services available via our global intranet. How many "knowledge workers" could live with Office 365 (the fully cloud version of Office) and do just fine ? Don't want to go to a fully "outside the firewall" cloud model, how about Office 2010 "online" version served up via your SharePoint 2010 installation.
Internal or external clouds?
All the ECM products worth a dime have web interfaces. So do the ERP suites and many (if not most) other classes of major applications. I am not impressed by the arguments that users who are used to PC's want to be able to set their wallpaper and listen to their music - ever heard of Last.fm ? Also are we not constantly informed that Millennial's will not come and work for us if they can't have Facebook and Twitter access? So have we not already passed the boundary from "my desktop" to "my web access" within the workplace ??
So you don't have to buy into the full Gmail, Google Docs, Google Apps world view to make the most of your ChromeOS machine, but if your an SMB / SME why not ?
Perhaps you could go the whole hog and ditch your Intranet 1.0 efforts and go offsite / cloud with a hosted intranet solution from the likes of Sosius or Vialects Noodle (good products IMHO).
So I can see the ChromeOS having a much bigger impact on the corporate world than the consumer one. This might require the CMS companies to put effort into HTML 5 and to speed up the release cycle for the next revamp of their interfaces.
However if Google want ChromeOS thin clients to break into them into the enterprise, they need to put in a lot more effort. Their (lack) of support to Enterprise Apps customers is almost legendary. As I have noted before I would really like to see them create "computing appliances" for companies to put into their data centres to build their private cloud infrastructures - GMail boxes, Google Apps boxes and Google Voice boxes to sit in the rack next to the Google Search Appliances. What this would need though is a full support organisation, with the correct corporate mindset - mind you even if they just pushed their full cloud based services through the corporate firewall they would still need this. So perhaps they should get out their wallets and buy an enterprise consulting firm ?
In summary - Google ChromeOS - it's all about the enterprise stupid !
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Google Chrome OS - think enterprise..........
I have said this before, and it appears I have to say it again, you have to consider the 'whole' and not the parts when thinking critically about some of the recent Google announcements.
What brings this on is the way Google Chrome OS got a real "kicking" in a podcast I was listening to on the train on the way to work this morning. "It's crap, it can't do anything without a network connection, its just the Chrome browser, thin computing was tried and failed before, yada yada yada......".
So Google will work with Netbook manufacturers to release "official' machines - so what ? There is the Chromium open source project. "its just Linux" again, so what ? In fact I am not even going to continue down that road.........
Think a little out of the box. My own personal interest is not in consumer computing. I don't care about Chrome OS versus Android on my phone or my netbook, I think about the enterprise space. I think of the implications for information and knowledge management, for ECM and intranets, and I think that a "thin client" based on Chrome OS plus a really good intranet could be a pleasent working experience. However I am also not saying this will work for everyone, so don't flame me because you need full on Windows for printing to your full colour A0 plotter, or for scanning invoices, or your Mac for graphic design, but lets think about it.....
I have ranted about what Google should / could do in the enterprise space before, and I think with their "private cloud" deals with the U.S. Federal Government, so of that might come to fruition, but I recently found this excellent post, which specifically focuses on Google Wave - another product which receives some heavy criticism from those who confess they "don't get it":
Google Wave Killed the ECM Star... George Parapadakis postulates his theory that Wave good have a major impact on the ECM space, for the reasons why I will qoute him directly:
"Why? because the ECM industry, and Document Management before it, was invented as a workaround to compensate for NOT being able to do what Google Wave does...."
Make sure you read the comments as well as his post. JM Pascal builds on the theme with his posting: Wave and ECM, my feelings and opinions. Some may note that all the big ECM vendors ahve been keen to jump on the E2.0 band wagon, with new collaboration tools and web based front ends to their industrial strength back end behemoths, tools such as EMC CentreStage, Oracle Beehive and maybe even SharePoint. So merging collaborative authoring into the wider collaboration tools seems to make sense to me.
However don't forget Wave is also a protocol, an extension / add on to XMPP, and we already have one old "groupware" vendor diving in with both feet, in the shape of Novell and their Pulse product. I am Pulse is just the first of many server products built on the Wave protocol / Wave Server foundation.
This brings another interesting angle to the ECM element - for many years there as has been a monolithic suite (examplified by EMC) approach to ECM software, versus a "build your own from best of breed" approach. So the integration possiblities provided by Wave, alongside initiaves such as CMIS could literally provide options and solutions that I personally am not imaginative enough to dream up right now ! Add open source into the equation, in the form of Alfresco, Nuxeo, MindTouch etc and we literally have a world of possibilities..... :-)
So back to Google Chrome OS. It's an enabler for some simple, low cost, low maintenance - yep almost 'thin computing' - use of either full on public cloud, so called "private cloud" or even just "inside the firewall" LAN based web technologies.
As I have said before, internal Wave, Docs, even the relativley crappy Sites, a GSA etc could enable a decent intranet. Push this to the next level with the latest web based GUI's for ERP and CRM systems, utilization of light weight AJAX toolkits to web enable your inhouse line of business apps, and yes all of a sudden alot of your staff, even sophisticated 'knowledge workers' can exist purely in their browser !
Even in a Microsoft environment, do I need Windows 7 and a full copy of MS Office when SharePoint 2010 is my ECMS, and it provides links to the "online" version of Office 2010 ? Nope Chrome OS would work just fine in that scenario.
Once again we are back to my old hobby horse of taking a truly holistic view of our intranet ecosystems and our information and knowledge management requirements.
Now, if we can just get some of the prominent detractors to think a little before dissing everything that they are not comfortable with, before exploring the possibilities
What brings this on is the way Google Chrome OS got a real "kicking" in a podcast I was listening to on the train on the way to work this morning. "It's crap, it can't do anything without a network connection, its just the Chrome browser, thin computing was tried and failed before, yada yada yada......".
So Google will work with Netbook manufacturers to release "official' machines - so what ? There is the Chromium open source project. "its just Linux" again, so what ? In fact I am not even going to continue down that road.........
Think a little out of the box. My own personal interest is not in consumer computing. I don't care about Chrome OS versus Android on my phone or my netbook, I think about the enterprise space. I think of the implications for information and knowledge management, for ECM and intranets, and I think that a "thin client" based on Chrome OS plus a really good intranet could be a pleasent working experience. However I am also not saying this will work for everyone, so don't flame me because you need full on Windows for printing to your full colour A0 plotter, or for scanning invoices, or your Mac for graphic design, but lets think about it.....
I have ranted about what Google should / could do in the enterprise space before, and I think with their "private cloud" deals with the U.S. Federal Government, so of that might come to fruition, but I recently found this excellent post, which specifically focuses on Google Wave - another product which receives some heavy criticism from those who confess they "don't get it":
Google Wave Killed the ECM Star... George Parapadakis postulates his theory that Wave good have a major impact on the ECM space, for the reasons why I will qoute him directly:
"Why? because the ECM industry, and Document Management before it, was invented as a workaround to compensate for NOT being able to do what Google Wave does...."
Make sure you read the comments as well as his post. JM Pascal builds on the theme with his posting: Wave and ECM, my feelings and opinions. Some may note that all the big ECM vendors ahve been keen to jump on the E2.0 band wagon, with new collaboration tools and web based front ends to their industrial strength back end behemoths, tools such as EMC CentreStage, Oracle Beehive and maybe even SharePoint. So merging collaborative authoring into the wider collaboration tools seems to make sense to me.
However don't forget Wave is also a protocol, an extension / add on to XMPP, and we already have one old "groupware" vendor diving in with both feet, in the shape of Novell and their Pulse product. I am Pulse is just the first of many server products built on the Wave protocol / Wave Server foundation.
This brings another interesting angle to the ECM element - for many years there as has been a monolithic suite (examplified by EMC) approach to ECM software, versus a "build your own from best of breed" approach. So the integration possiblities provided by Wave, alongside initiaves such as CMIS could literally provide options and solutions that I personally am not imaginative enough to dream up right now ! Add open source into the equation, in the form of Alfresco, Nuxeo, MindTouch etc and we literally have a world of possibilities..... :-)
So back to Google Chrome OS. It's an enabler for some simple, low cost, low maintenance - yep almost 'thin computing' - use of either full on public cloud, so called "private cloud" or even just "inside the firewall" LAN based web technologies.
As I have said before, internal Wave, Docs, even the relativley crappy Sites, a GSA etc could enable a decent intranet. Push this to the next level with the latest web based GUI's for ERP and CRM systems, utilization of light weight AJAX toolkits to web enable your inhouse line of business apps, and yes all of a sudden alot of your staff, even sophisticated 'knowledge workers' can exist purely in their browser !
Even in a Microsoft environment, do I need Windows 7 and a full copy of MS Office when SharePoint 2010 is my ECMS, and it provides links to the "online" version of Office 2010 ? Nope Chrome OS would work just fine in that scenario.
Once again we are back to my old hobby horse of taking a truly holistic view of our intranet ecosystems and our information and knowledge management requirements.
Now, if we can just get some of the prominent detractors to think a little before dissing everything that they are not comfortable with, before exploring the possibilities
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Chrome OS - no big deal, technically ?
Missing out the X Window system and using the browser as GUI ontop of Linux - it's not actually that innovative really. Don't get me wrong, I would give it a whiz on my Netbook, and I want to see how it pans out, but at the moment all this talk of not using it as a desktop PC OS seems to be missing a lot of opportunities and I wonder if Google might change its tune on that. Super fast, super slimline OS, with fast browser running HTML 5 based interfaces to all your business apps - sounds like it might be appealing to enterprises to me.
Anyway, I seem to remember using the browser as the main interface to Linux for some time now - that would Konqueror on KDE - the file manager come browser that shows what IE should have been :-)
Seriously though, not everything has to be in the cloud, there are plenty of lightweight web servers you could run on your local machine, kind of like running Webmin, so surely you could still have Chrome the browser as the interface but access local apps and storage.
Overall, a little underwhelmed by this inital release of information but we will see how it develops won't we ? If you have not seen it yet, check out the Chrome OS demo video on YouTube.
Anyway, I seem to remember using the browser as the main interface to Linux for some time now - that would Konqueror on KDE - the file manager come browser that shows what IE should have been :-)
Seriously though, not everything has to be in the cloud, there are plenty of lightweight web servers you could run on your local machine, kind of like running Webmin, so surely you could still have Chrome the browser as the interface but access local apps and storage.
Overall, a little underwhelmed by this inital release of information but we will see how it develops won't we ? If you have not seen it yet, check out the Chrome OS demo video on YouTube.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Chrome OS and the enterprise - Updated x 2
(See bottom of page for updates)
As OM Malik noted on his blog, there appears to be a lot of hot air and not a lot of substantive analysis of the news of the week (?) the Google Chrome OS.
You can find some of that hot air here, a list of Google Blog search results for 'Chrome OS':
There is plenty of comment about low spec'd netbooks and cut down OS's not cutting the mustard etc, and why not, the Google 'press release' blog posting does afterall mention netbooks as a specific market. However no one seems to have thought about the bigger picture here, what about the enterprise market ?
Remember Sun and the 'network is the computer' - oh yes, we could be heading back round that circular argument again. I have blogged previously before on the fact that the 'cloud' is not reliable enough for many corporations, but that hosted apps such as GMail, Google Docs, and in the future Google Wave is (or will be) good enough for many smaller businesses - but where are the Google Apps Appliances to sit in the rack next to the GSA ? EMC has certainly talked about 'private enterprise clouds' - building your own 'cloud computing' type environment on your corporate backbone and inside the firewall.
So why would you not put Chrome OS onto desktops, conventional laptops and smaller netbooks (and lets not forget Android powered phones !) to provide the latest in 'thin client' experience in a corporate environment ? Simpler and cheaper support than Windows ?
Stephen Arnold sticks to his theme of looking more deeply into what Google is up to, and is maybe closer to drawing some similar conclusions in his post: Chrome, a shiny wrap for the plumbing of Google
Does anyone else think that when this vapourware becomes solid in 2010, it might be as part of a major push into the enterprise IT scene by Google ? Your own Gmail box versus Exchange ? Wave and Docs versus SharePoint and Office ? GSA versus FAST ? A YouTube appliance as Digital Asset Management ???
Who knows, only time will tell, but personally I think it would be very interesting to see a Wave and Docs based ECMS taking on the big boys in the space ;-)
Meanwhile on my nice new corporate IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre, with its locked down corporate Windowws desktop I am realy missing tabbed browsing, Digsby, Tweetdeck etc............
UPDATE - The Register actually seem to agree with me to some extent, they remember the Network Computer (NC) and wonder if Google might cosy up to Oracle for NC-redux ?
UPDATE #2 - Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ComputerWorld also seems to have caught part of the bigger picture in his posting: Why Google Chrome OS Matters Already on Day 1
As OM Malik noted on his blog, there appears to be a lot of hot air and not a lot of substantive analysis of the news of the week (?) the Google Chrome OS.
You can find some of that hot air here, a list of Google Blog search results for 'Chrome OS':
There is plenty of comment about low spec'd netbooks and cut down OS's not cutting the mustard etc, and why not, the Google 'press release' blog posting does afterall mention netbooks as a specific market. However no one seems to have thought about the bigger picture here, what about the enterprise market ?
Remember Sun and the 'network is the computer' - oh yes, we could be heading back round that circular argument again. I have blogged previously before on the fact that the 'cloud' is not reliable enough for many corporations, but that hosted apps such as GMail, Google Docs, and in the future Google Wave is (or will be) good enough for many smaller businesses - but where are the Google Apps Appliances to sit in the rack next to the GSA ? EMC has certainly talked about 'private enterprise clouds' - building your own 'cloud computing' type environment on your corporate backbone and inside the firewall.
So why would you not put Chrome OS onto desktops, conventional laptops and smaller netbooks (and lets not forget Android powered phones !) to provide the latest in 'thin client' experience in a corporate environment ? Simpler and cheaper support than Windows ?
Stephen Arnold sticks to his theme of looking more deeply into what Google is up to, and is maybe closer to drawing some similar conclusions in his post: Chrome, a shiny wrap for the plumbing of Google
Does anyone else think that when this vapourware becomes solid in 2010, it might be as part of a major push into the enterprise IT scene by Google ? Your own Gmail box versus Exchange ? Wave and Docs versus SharePoint and Office ? GSA versus FAST ? A YouTube appliance as Digital Asset Management ???
Who knows, only time will tell, but personally I think it would be very interesting to see a Wave and Docs based ECMS taking on the big boys in the space ;-)
Meanwhile on my nice new corporate IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre, with its locked down corporate Windowws desktop I am realy missing tabbed browsing, Digsby, Tweetdeck etc............
UPDATE - The Register actually seem to agree with me to some extent, they remember the Network Computer (NC) and wonder if Google might cosy up to Oracle for NC-redux ?
UPDATE #2 - Steven Vaughan-Nichols at ComputerWorld also seems to have caught part of the bigger picture in his posting: Why Google Chrome OS Matters Already on Day 1
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