Every Cloud Has A Chromium Lining

The article itself (by Lance Ulanoff) is not FUD.

The quotes from Sergey Brin, however, are deepest Fuddery. Never let a Stanford PhD out into the real world, that’s what I say. What is Chrome for?

I think the most revealing comment is “if we didn’t do it, somebody else would.” Indeed. Competition is the last thing that the fragmented Android market needs, so I suppose it makes a sick sort of sense to own the extra fragmentation yourselves. Not as much sense as unfragmenting the market, but still.

Other than that, it’s all over the shop.

Wait, let’s stop there. Why did Brin bring up security?

Apparently, in the world of the Blessed Sergey:

Ultimately you lose security when you have complexity. Anything you need to install…any driver, all those things add attack surfaces

Also functionality. But who needs functionality? And we should be happy that malicious hackers will no longer need to direct their bots at millions of heterogeneous computer setups in the hope of snagging the odd few hundred. It’s much better to have them target a set of servers in the Cloud (which is where these “attack surfaces” will, of course, end up), because the DoD has never had a problem with this sort of set up, nor have Iranian nuclear reactors, etc etc.

I think with that kind of head to-toe software hardware model combined with statelessness, that eliminates a lot of complexity

Um … no it does not. I can’t think of a single application that is truly stateless.* This man is a poster child for the Web, and he’s never heard of cookies? You can move state around (which is what the cloud does), but you cannot eliminate it.

I don’t know what he means by “head-to-toe,” either, btw.

Microsoft or other OS vendors, I think the complexity of managing your computers is really torturing users, all of them.

It’s the Comfy Chair Syndrome again, isn’t it?

NOBODY expects the Google Chrome OS! Our chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Our four...no… Amongst our weapons…. Amongst our weaponry…are such elements as fear, surprise…. I’ll come in again.

I’m assuming the first app for the Chrome OS will not be Blogger. No way does Blogger either torture users or eliminate state by, er, eliminating what that state represents.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just go on using that ole OS vendor stuff. Torture me! I don’t care! I’m prepared to put that effort … actually, now I come to think about it, it isn’t really much more effort than, say, switching the goddamn PC on … in order to be allowed to do what the hell I want to do. Without a stupid and retarded and unpredictable Web interface, if you please.

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*Edit: No, I can, after a bit of contemplation. Email is about as stateless as you can get. The sendmail protocol is a model of statelessness.

And look at the result.