[lbo-talk] Steve Jobs responds to Google Chrome OS

[ravi]

On Jul 9, 2009, at 12:31 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> --- On Thu, 7/9/09, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
>> First, short term: cloud based apps suffer various
>> limitations that are a natural result of their lack of
>> access to all local resources as well as their lack of a
>> long UI development history. Regarding the latter, as one of
>> the commentors on Fake Steve's blog noted, web apps today
>> rely on the hideous kludge that is JavaScript + AJAX (not to
>> forget, HTML/CSS). On top of that, Google has (IMHO) a poor
>> track record when it comes to UI. And the assumption that
>> near-real-time always-on Internet access is hardly
>> justifiable.
>>
> <snip happens>
>
> [WS:] That may be true, but you are missing an obvious political  
> aspect of the Google's move - a challenge to Micro$oft monopoly on  
> the OS.  This monopoly is analogous to all roads in the US being  
> owned by one corporate entity having the power to dictate who can  
> drive on them and how.  This is the mother of all proprietary  
> formats and protocols.
>

I do not agree that I missed it. The whole GNU idea, over-run by the  
Open Source idea, and the existence of GNU/Linux, and the effort by  
Canonical to make the OS user-friendly, are all threats to Microsoft.  
Is Google's move at least in the vein of these efforts? Even that is  
not certain, given their eagerness to fork code and effort (both with  
Chrome and now Chrome OS, but perhaps even Android).

A small point: Microsoft's Exchange mail service supported the  
standards based IMAP protocol for mail access well before Google  
grudgingly added it to their Gmail service a year or so ago.


> Breaking that monopoly has a value in itself, regardless of the  
> technical merits or demerits of Google OS.

Perhaps, but I think today, *BSD, Mozilla, Apache, GNU/Linux, even Sun  
and Apple deserve the credit for this effort (breaking the monopoly).  
Google on the other hand has almost always *favoured* the Microsoft  
platform (Google Earth, Picasa, Chrome... the list of Windows only --  
at some point, or even now -- software is fairly large).

	--ravi