14 DAY TRIAL // While Google Chrome OS is not ready for the prime time, Google has started shipping devices to some lucky users in order to test the operating system and the hardware in the wild. This is a good move since, even if does mean that it ships a beta quality operating system, it enables people to get accustomed to the idea of a cloud OS.
Chrome OS may not be particularly exciting today and doesn't stack up when compared to any of the popular operating systems. Many of the things people are used to doing simply aren't possible in Chrome OS and many of those will never be, but that's by design.
Some people may want to plug in their printers and will be disappointed. Others may want to play a DVD or take their music collection with them.
But these things aren't possible on the netbooks Chrome OS is built to run on and won't be possible on any device that Chrome OS eventually ships with.
At this point, there isn't even a simple way of getting your photos from an USB drive to a Chrome OS machine. This is coming in future builds of the operating system, but all of these issues are moot.
Chrome OS is not supposed to do what Windows already does, it's supposed to completely change the way people think about software and applications on their computers.
Google wants everything to be in the cloud. Not just the things that are possible today and it doesn't want web apps to be a sort of poorer cousin of full-blown desktop apps, it wants users to be able to do on the web anything they do now on their computer.
But changing the minds of millions of people and developers around the world and challenging a model that has been around for more than two decades is going to take time.
The Cr-48 Chrome OS netbooks are just the first step towards a future where computers become disposable and the stuff we store on them or the things we do with our computers won't be tied to any particular device.
While Google Chrome OS is not ready for the prime time, Google has started shipping devices to some lucky users in order to test the operating system and the hardware in the wild. This is a good move since, even if does mean that it ships a beta quality operating system, it enables people to get accustomed to the idea of a cloud OS.
To drive home this point, Google sacrificed some Cr-48 netbooks in order to create a video to illustrate the idea. The unfortunate netbooks are destroyed in a number of creative ways, yet Glen Murphy, a Chrome user experience designer, is able to continue working because all of his data is safe in the cloud.