How Android apps and the Play Store will come to Chromebooks

Google: Skype, Photoshop, Office and every Android app on Chrome OS.

In the second month after Infrics.com went live in 2011, I switched my primary computing platform to Google's Chrome OS.  As I've written, I believe it is the best expression of the major trend I've labeled "the stateless future."

Time has proven the accuracy of that prediction.  Chrome OS devices now outsell all others combined in the education market; in Q1 2016, IDC Research reported that Chrome OS has now overtaken Mac to become the second most popular PC operating system.  Enterprise penetration of Chrome OS is accelerating, and for good reason: incredibly simple deployment and management, excellent built-in security, plus dramatically lower cost of acquisition and TCO.

At the recently-concluded annual I/O developers conference, Google announced that, beginning with the next developer environment of Chrome OS and soon to be released in the stable channel, the Google App Store and its apps will run on Chrome OS.  Here is their announcement and a product demo:

The entire presentation is about 24 minutes, I've started the clip almost 5 minutes in.  Among the important takeaways:

• Every Android app will work offline, eliminating one of the last excuses not to deploy Chrome OS.
• This includes movies, music, photos, and the entire range of business applications in addition to games.
• The architecture runs a version of Android in a container within the existing Chrome OS shell, and it is fully integrated into Chrome OS standard features like notifications.
• This is "the other shoe dropping" after the organizational change at Google that brought the Android and Chrome OS teams together.  Chrome OS is not going anywhere: Android's next release will adopt the seamless behind-the-scenes update system that Chrome OS has always had, and Chrome OS will add almost all of the Android app and feature set to the laptop and desktop. 

I moved all my data to the cloud: living stateless all the time with Google Drive and Chrome OS

Sometimes the new is easier when it looks like the familiar.

Here is a screen capture of my Google Drive interface, using a friendly 

tree-hierarchy folder layout. For this folder of classic car photos,

I'm using a large-icon preview.

Everything is in the cloud, but you'd never know.

Would you store all of your data in the cloud?

Everything? Documents, photos, music, video? Not a single item in local storage other than what's cached in the browser?

I did just that.  This is the story of why I did and how that happened. When your data lives in the cloud, you have decoupled it from local storage. You can access your stuff on every machine, because it's no longer tied to the particular machine you have in your hand.   Data becomes stateless.

I believe it's a big trend, an important enabling technology.

In the stateless future, every device is a blank slate, ready to become what you ask of it.  Lose it, have it stolen, run over it with a truck--you don't have to care, because everything that makes the machine yours is in the cloud, free from any specific machine and ready to use the moment you sign in somewhere else, on some other device.  There is a lot to say about this idea; Infrics' coverage and advocacy of the stateless future is here.

So far, Google is the only major company bringing this idea to market*.  Improvements in the ChromeOS stateless operating system and in the Google Drive cloud data service made something possible and easy last month, my move to all-cloud-data, all-the-time.

In other words, last month, I turned my Chromebook into a dumb box.  Using drag and drop between windows in ChromeOS, I moved every file I had stored locally on the machine's flashdrive up to the cloud, and onto Google Drive.  It is now my default storage mechanism and the solid state storage on the Chromebook is empty.  There is an exception: my music and videos are in Google Play Music and Amazon Cloud Player--still cloud-based, but not part of Drive. Even though cloud-data-only is practical, we are not quite there in terms of a truly unified cloud data system.  The digital ecosystem needs work.

It doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all.  I set Drive as my default storage within ChromeOS settings, so I can save to Drive directly.  I can print any document or photo or web page to a .pdf stored in Drive. I can attach files to mail from Drive, or upload directly from Drive without any local presence of the file (as I did to import the screen capture above into this post.)

You can throw everything into Drive as one big bucket, and retrieve it on the fly using search; if you prefer more structure, use Drive's tree structure of nested folders to organize files.  It feels just like the comfortable C: drive I've used for 20 years on legacy systems, but it's as stateless as tomorrow.  Unlike the old C: drive, I can get to every file I own on any device I use without ever synching anything.

Local data is the answer to a need from the earliest days of hardwired networks, low bandwidth, and legacy thinking.  We are past those days. I gave up local data, because I believe it's time to move on.  Now, no laptop hard drive crash can hurt me, no thief can cost me months of work by taking my computer.  I never back up anything, because there is nothing that needs to be backed up.  I'll never fail to give a presentation because I left my computer in the taxi, or because I brought the wrong SD card. Everything I need is everywhere I am.



*Mozilla's stateless FirefoxOS for mobile devices is very promising, and near-market.  Because they are tied to local applications and fat operating systems like Mac OS, iOS, and Windows, I do not consider the cloud data offerings from Apple and Microsoft to be serious stateless contenders--yet.  Cloud data services like Dropbox are close to being stateless, but lack ease of integration to be useful alternatives to the Google Drive/ChromeOS pairing of stateless OS and stateless data.  There is much room for discussion on this point in the comments.  I hope you will share your ideas and questions.

My year with a Chromebook and ChromeOS: stateless in real life

Today is the one-year anniversary of the delivery of my Samsung Chromebook, the first commercially-available laptop with a stateless operating system.  So how did it go?  I'll do this in bullet points, ending with a few about what's going right with ChromeOS, and why many people still don't understand what's going on here.

--The best thing I can say about ChromeOS is that I haven't used anything else for the whole year.  There are a few exceptions: I've booted up my Windows laptop to use Skype, because some friends and I use it to stay in touch; there is no Skype version for ChromeOS.  That's more habit than anything else, Google Chat and Google Voice are fine substitutes, but the friend I talk with most often has trouble getting them to work on his Mac.  I've occasionally needed to create or edit something in Microsoft Office-compatible formats, and the locally-installed version of OpenOffice on my Windows computer still does that a little better than Google Docs. Since June 15, 2011, everything you've seen on Infrics.com has been written, formatted, and published from my Chromebook.

--Although I'm still using the same machine as a year ago, ChromeOS has grown into a completely new operating system in that time, with windows, a taskbar, drag-and-drop file ability, and as of today, even a desktop I can customize with my own images.  ChromeOS did another of its silent, in-the-background updates yesterday, and new features appeared like magic.  Notice that my own photo of the Golden Gate Bridge is now the desktop.

--One of the biggest challenges I faced a year ago was that ChromeOS didn't have a cloud-based equivalent of the familiar C:/ drive from my old computer.  I could--and sometimes had to--store things locally on the flash drive. It's still there, but in the Developer-mode version of ChromeOS I'm running, storage is now fully cloud integrated with Google Drive. I can save to, attach from, rename, delete, and drag-to-move files on the cloud directory as easily as those stored on my local machine. Or from one to the other, as shown in this screen capture.

Looks familiar: dragging a file from local storage to Google Drive, using windows on a desktop.

--I've never once been interrupted by a nag screen to update anything, or a virus scan that needs to run; neither of those is needed or possible on ChromeOS.

--The "what will I do if I have no internet" fear turns out to be unfounded. WiFi is almost everywhere, and when it's not, I use the built-in 3G Verizon connection, prepaid at 100mb/month free for two years.  Even though 100 megs is practically nothing in today's use patterns, I've never once used up the entire allotment in a month.

What's going right:


--Improvements to the user interface (UI).  The windowing environment is familiar and comfortable.  But it's all rendered using browser technologies, and has all the inherent benefits of a stateless OS.  It just LOOKS like other operating systems. I can take a sledgehammer to this machine, and not lose a thing; all I need do is sign on to a new one, and my whole world is there at once.  No other OS can make this claim, and it's huge.

--Upgrades to file management that reduce the need to store anything on the local machine.

--Improvements to web applications and Chrome extensions that extend the value of the "world from the cloud" experience.  The Google Docs suite of products is getting better--a lot better--all the time. There are more and better web apps every day, like the whole suite of photo and audio tools now available from Aviary.com.

--New ChromeOS computers that use increased power to improve the UI in resolution and speed. The heart of the stateless idea is that the local machine provides connection to the cloud and the elements of a good UI experience; that's where you can add bells and whistles with good effect.

What people still don't "get."


--Complaints about the ability to run applications locally.  They miss the point: you use a stateless OS so that you don't need local apps at all. Google has added offline viewing of documents and e-mail, and ChromeOS has always had the ability to display .pdfs, play stored audio, and show locally stored images when not connected.  But each of those is geared for what turns out to be a very small number of cases, and the number of times when the ability to run offline apps is truly needed is growing smaller by the day. Working to make the offline experience on ChromeOS more like a legacy computer is wasted energy at best, a betrayal of the stateless promise at worst.

--Comparisons to Windows-this or Mac-that.  Microsoft and Apple are battling each other to make a better steam locomotive, while the stateless future is one of jets and rockets.  Fat OSes are just plain old-fashioned now, they are only relevant because of legacy, not because of need.  If I were AAPL or MS, I'd fight to perpetuate my fat operating system, too.  But I consider that battle to be essentially over, and they both lost.

--The idea that ChromeOS devices should be cheap.  I have to confess to mixed feelings about this; yes, you need less machine to run the stateless world, that's a big part of the stateless appeal.  Some stateless devices should be so cheap as to be practically throwaways, but some may be very elegant expressions of personal taste, status, and professional standing.  Today, we're somewhere in the middle.  But it does appear clear that the initial prices we're seeing for new-generation Chromebooks reflect the ability to get people to pay more in order to say "look, I'm first."  Look for prices to drop within 6 months.

Clearly, I have a point of view here, and it's on the side of any stateless device. But I don't arrive at those feelings out of thin air.  For a look at the Infrics.com complete coverage of stateless, click the Stateless Future tab on the page header.

More soon.  Please let me know of your own experiences, or your thoughts about ChromeOS and stateless, either in the comments, or e-mail, or message me on Google+.

The future in a catchphrase

OK, I've been posting a lot today.  One last thought, this one is from me instead of curation of someone else's reporting.

Mashable posted a major slam this evening of the new Chromebook and Chromebox.  In the process of posting my contrasting opinion on their Facebook post, I said:

Everything you need is everywhere you are.

I think this will be my new slogan.  It sums up almost everything I think about where technology is taking us.  I said it in the context of the benefits of stateless operating systems, but it's really about the ways technology gives greater voice to community, moves power to the end users in enterprises, and will shape the future of the machines we will use to take us there.

You heard it here first.

New Chromebook & Chromebox Are Good Enough to Grab Minds & Market Share

Image from ReadWriteWeb

Today was the big launch for the second-generation Chromebooks and the Chromebox (the ultra-small desktop version.)  As you may have read from earlier posts, I've been using the pre-release developer release of the new Aura interface on Chrome OS--the windowing version that became standard release today--and like it very much.  The developer version already includes Google Drive as a native way to save files to the cloud, along with the existing file manager that interacts with local storage or files on an SD card.  It will be added to the public release very soon, helping to make Chrome OS a much more complete stateless environment.

Here is the story, from ReadWriteWeb:

New Chromebook & Chromebox Are Good Enough to Grab Minds & Market Share:

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5 steps to stateless

Stateless data, applications, and devices are maturing so rapidly, and have such clear business benefits, I believe it’s time for businesses to take action.   You can begin to realize those benefits almost immediately, and you can make sure your organization is aligning itself in the present for a future that is certainly on the way.

In the stateless model, data and applications run in a private or public cloud.  The devices you use to consume them have only two main functions:

• connect you to the cloud.
• provide a user interface that lets you access and interact with your applications and data.

This article looks at 5 fundamentals of the stateless future.

For businesses, the benefits are profound.  Security goes up, because data is managed centrally, not scattered on thousands of hard drives and memory chips, where it is subject to malfunction, loss, or theft.  Application updates are done on one machine.  Devices become almost interchangeable, with simple configuration needs. Management costs go down, as do the costs of the devices themselves.  A four-year-old computer can be kept in service, since it must now do simpler work.   Answering the call of users to bring their own devices becomes easier, since for the most part you can deliver your entire work environment securely to any browser.  Stateless is "your business as a service."

Of all the trends that will impact business, and of all the things that will benefit business, stateless is among the easiest choices.  It offers clear rewards and very quick payback, and can be implemented with iteration rather than a single giant project.  

This illustration plots elements of the stateless future into four tracks, from legacy to pure stateless.  The latter isn’t quite possible yet, and few people reading this will find themselves purely in the former; it's the middle--the “act now zone”--where action is possible, and needed.




1. Data: cloud before data center before local device
The local machine is about the worst possible place for data to live; we still follow the practice largely out of habit, because it was necessary in the days when connectivity and bandwidth were primitive.  Neither is true today.  User data storage offerings are maturing in both the consumer and the enterprise spaces; where data storage from legacy client/server applications is dependent on local installation, move toward desktop virtualization (see below.) Of all the things that offer quick benefits and move you toward stateless, getting data off local machines offers the easiest path and the quickest deployment.

2. Applications: web before app before fat client
Fat client applications represent almost everything that’s wrong with legacy IT.  Let’s count the sins: Resource Hog.  Security risk. Nightmare to install and maintain. Constrains choice of deployed hardware, especially when companies are faced with user demands to “bring their own.” Fat clients on local machines were a miracle 20 years ago, a burden today.

Faced with that reality, it’s easy to be seduced by all the current hype around the “app internet.”  Programs available in an “app store” seem so much lighter-weight, almost elegant in their point-click-run simplicity and the storefront environment in which consumers devour them.  

But as they stand now, they only solve a few problems.  Some are only available for one ecosystem, like Apple’s iOS.  Or if they are widely available, say for Android as well, they’re sold by different vendors, each within its own walled garden.   In some cases, they use cloud storage of data as the default, which is on the right track.  But they still must be locally installed, still must sync data from the cloud to the local device, and still need endless device-by-device updates.  

Contrast that with the stateless, web-delivered alternative:  available on any device you sign in to, maintained and updated centrally, does not need to sync data, and needs only a browser on the other end in order to work.  With the advent of HTML5, web based apps are growing in power very rapidly, and are already being deployed preferentially in some cases.  Do not make the strategic mistake of investing in new applications that can’t be delivered to a browser, or else risk getting trapped in the same client/server problems of the past.

One interesting interim step is used by SaaS provider Podio.com; one Podio app is installed locally on iOS or Android, and provides a gateway into a big range of cloud-sourced apps in the Podio portfolio.  Install one app locally, run hundreds from the cloud.  Look for more of these “adaptive” app gateways in the near future as a bridge technology until pure web apps mature.

This is an important point: cloud-delivered, browser-accessed data and applications are not purely stateless, but they abstract most of the old problems away from the local machine, making it possible for you to deliver many stateless benefits now.

3. Desktops: browser before virtualized before local
We graduated from command-line computer interfaces  in the 1980s.  Even my Commodore 128 had a primitive mouse-controlled “click on icons” interface called GEOS.  For most practical purposes, everything else we’re used since the C:/ prompt is a desktop.  The multiple screens on smartphones are desktops, so is the work area on a tablet.  

It’s a visual interface between the user and whatever the user is doing; now that we’ve had desktops for 30+ years, it’s a comfortable place.    However, it’s no secret that the trend in technology has been away from the desktop as we know it for many years  So much so, that for many current knowledge workers, a browser sitting on a desktop is where we spend most of our time at work.  You may work all day in IE, Firefox, or Chrome, and never need to look at the underlying desktop once. The metaphor of the desktop and that of the tabbed browser window are merging.

Many of your needs can already be met in a browser, without a desktop at all: e-mail, several business applications,  and most office productivity applications like word processing and presentations.  In that case, the browser essentially is the desktop.  That’s a sort of “stateless light” and represents progress.  

But let’s be realistic. Many important parts of your business are client/server, and will be part of your portfolio for years to come.  You can still begin the stateless journey today by shifting to virtualized desktops, in which a licensed copy of a traditional fat OS runs on a server, complete with your legacy client/server applications, delivered in stateless form to a browser.  

At that point, when your users get their entire experience online, you’re free of concern about local updates beyond the operating system and the browser itself.  While desktop virtualization is often promoted as a cost-saving measure, I would argue that the truly compelling case is because you can then keep your whole environment secure, do updates and backups all at once, and make it available anywhere on a “need to use” basis--in a browser.  Again, a solid step in which many benefits of the stateless future can be delivered today.

In an interesting turn of events, technology is now coming full circle, not just to a “post-PC” era, but a “post-browser” one as well.  The new Aura window manager in Google’s Chrome OS remains completely stateless, but has a familiar desktop interface.  “Browser” was an application that ran on a traditional fat operating system, but in the stateless world, in which you’re just delivering a user interface to cloud based data and apps,  you can make the UI look like whatever you wish.  In Aura, a “browser” delivers a “desktop,” upon which sit “browser” windows.  It looks like the past, but it offers the benefits of the future.  

4. Roles: deploy to the need
Not all parts of the stateless future are here yet. Neither are all parts evenly distributed, and there are a few needs that argue for the old style “data/application/machine in one.”  

What roles are “stateless ready” right now?  Any knowledge worker or administrative/clerical role that primarily works in one place, or has good WiFi/3g/4g access in the locations they work, is an excellent candidate for a browser-delivered stateless experience using a hybrid of web apps and desktop virtualization.  Many of these could go pure stateless now, using Chromebooks.

Media production, involving a lot of processing of image or sound files, will likely not be suited for a pure stateless environment.    There are also knowledge workers who need office productivity applications during many long flights, and must still rely on old “local client, sync to server when connected” applications.  But have you noticed how many flights now have WiFi? The "I can't use stateless because I need to be connected all the time" argument is fading away.

The point is, you may be using the tech equivalent of a tour bus for many, many people in your organization who could get where they need to go in a minivan or compact car. Don’t wait until stateless can serve every role in your company before you begin offering its benefits to roles that are ready today.  


5. Machines: extend the life of legacy, deploy stateless where possible
We’ve already considered the ways desktop virtualization and browser enablement can allow for longer lifecycles with your existing laptops and desktop computers.  As long as a machine has the power to deliver good connectivity and run a browser, you can deliver a near-stateless experience to those machines using browsers and virtualized desktops.

Stateless content and applications are an excellent match out of the box for the new ultrabook laptop computers, or for any bring-your-own-device program.  

As this is written in spring 2012, the Google Chromebook is the only stateless device you can buy, and only from two vendors: Samsung and Acer.   New, more powerful models of Chromebooks are on the way, but I will tell you from experience that the first generation has served me well as my primary computer for almost 11 months.  Mozilla is working on the stateless phone, with their Boot2Gecko project.

Conclusion: takeaways
Although the full realization of the stateless future will use a stateless device to interact with data and applications delivered from the web, there are straightforward steps you can take today to make the stateless delivery of data and apps available right away, even if you are using Windows or Mac OSes.  

Try all these pilot programs:

• Users’ data in the cloud, not the local machine
• Virtualized desktops to a variety of laptops and desktops.  
• Get some Chromebooks into service in different roles, find out to what extent a fully-stateless environment works for you or does not.

In my opinion, the future will be stateless.  Because it touches so many things, and offers benefits across so many boundaries, this article is the start of the implementation discussion, not the complete dialog.  I’d like to have that longer discussion with you if you’re thinking about stateless, both to share my ideas, and to learn from yours.  Do let me know by e-mail or in the comments what you’re interested in.  I’d be happy to plan a seminar with your team, either online or at your site, to look at the entire stateless picture and your plans to get there.  

This article is part of ongoing coverage of the stateless future, one of the big ideas.  

A New Window Manager for Chrome OS

A New Window Manager for Chrome OS:

Aura is the name of the new window management system for ChromeOS, the first commercially-available stateless operating system.  This is what it looks like: windows, a "desktop," and a ribbon of applications at the bottom of the screen.  It's still in beta, but available to anyone with a Samsung or Acer Chromebook by selecting "Developer" mode.

The point is, stateless doesn't need to look much different than the interfaces we are already used to.  One of the concepts emerging from the Chrome OS deployment (I've used it every day for the last 10 months) is that much of the criticism has been around the idea that we're "post-PC" and the browser is dead.  In fact, we're moving to "post-browser" as well.  You don't need a row of tabs across the top of a browser, nor pull-down menus, a URL bar, or any of the broswer iconography to deliver applications and data from the cloud.

Stateless devices are a conceptual leap for some of us.  The difference is, most all processing, storage, and applications themselves live on the web.  This is the central idea:  the device itself only needs to provide connectivity, display, and user interface. 

So although, as some have already pointed out, this looks a lot like Windows 7, it's still purely stateless.  I can smash this Chromebook with a hammer until it's in pieces on the floor, then hit the power button on a new one, get a login prompt in 10 seconds, and every bit of my computing experience a few seconds after that.  I can change my password from my phone before a thief ever has a chance to try and log in, rendering the device a blank slate.

If you are in an enterprise, it is time for you to start piloting this technology now.  

--coming soon, a new article: 5 steps to stateless you and your enterprise can take today.

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Chromebook update: at 4+ months

Samsng Chromebook image from Amazon.com

It's been over four months since I took delivery of my Samsung Chromebook, the first commercially available computer using Google's Chrome OS, the lightweight operating system in which applications and data come from the cloud rather than the local device.

So, how is it to live with every day, and see the benefits and shortcomings firsthand?  Is Chrome OS a legitimate way to live and work with your computer?  In a word, yeah, it is.  This is a fairly short article, because for the most part, Chrome OS just works.  I don't feel deprived by using a lightweight operating system, despite the fact that a good part of my work involves writing and creating graphics for blog articles.

My action item advice for any enterprise that's curious about Chrome OS: do a pilot, even with just a few of the leaders of your IT division and your main lines of business.  The idea will reveal its value to you through use and iteration.  You will justify it because of potential cost savings, but you'll deploy it because it makes lives better and work more productive.

That said, here are three experience reports from this field test to consider:

• Web-based applications: I now use Google Apps exclusively to write and create graphics and presentations.  All of their services are being improved very quickly, and if you haven't tried Google Apps lately, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.  There is a new look to the interface across the board, which I'll call "post-imitation-3D."  Shadows around buttons are gone, so are brightly-colored icons that look like jellybeans and the like.  It's very professional in appearance.  Where I live online: Faceboook, LinkedIn, TweetDeck, Google+, news sites, the infrics.com site and composition area, all are fully functional and there is no sacrifice.
  
  But there is a benefit.  One morning I spilled my whole cup of coffee right on the keyboard of the Chromebook.  It spluttered, zapped a bit, and shut down.  "Oh, (expletive!)" I did not want to replace a $500 machine so soon after I bought it.  But to keep working, I just booted up my regular laptop, launched the Chrome browser, and was right back to work, every word I had been writing saved to the cloud in the background.  The idea that everything you need is available everywhere you are, on almost any machine, is truly transformational; it deserves much more attention in the enterprise and the marketplace.
  
  By the way, both Google docs and Gmail now have offline capabilities that allow for limited use in the rare cases (like on some flights) where you can't reach the internet.  Not perfect yet, but getting much better.
• Which leads me to Samsung's Chromebook as a machine.  The actual device is somewhat less robust and less satisfying than it should be for a primary business tool. Key action is a little too cheap-feeling, the materials are a bit low end, and I find the no-button trackpad (right click requires tapping the trackpad with two fingers, for instance) gives me less control than I'd like.  The very bright display continues to be great, and the long battery life has become my expectation; charging the laptop and using it all day on battery just feels like the way things should work.  But I want a bit more class; simple does not need to mean cheap.
  
  However, I am pleased to report that after the coffee spill incident, I left the machine open, on its side, in the breeze of an air conditioning vent at home for two days, hit the "on" button, and it came right back. It has continued to work flawlessly ever since.
• Finally, what about Chrome OS in general.  I'm very impressed. The background updates have spoiled me; when I have to launch a regular computer and wait (and wait and wait and wait...) for updates to run, that just seems terribly old fashioned.  When it takes 90 seconds or more to get booted up and online, I know there is no longer any reason to put up with that. In August, I went to Google's home campus and met with a team leader from the Chrome OS-for-enterprise effort.  He told me that a growing number of enterprises "get it," and they are some of the strongest advocates. Fast and easy are my new normal. It's not that the fat-OS world is awful, it's just no longer worth it.

Anything else?  I have to say I fear Google's commitment to Chrome OS has yet to be proven; the excitement and discussion around Chrome OS has been lost in the volume of news about Android and Google+.  Will it become the next Google Buzz, and be quietly killed off later?  

With the explosion of tablet computing, when will that form factor enjoy the stateless computing benefits of Chrome OS, or will it forever be Android?  Android is maturing rapidly, but still suffers the fat-OS limitations of locally-installed software, locally-maintained data, and the need for updates to both OS and applications on a regular basis.  Google pointed out to me that both Apple and Microsoft maintain separate OSes for their mobile platforms--but that fails to answer the question, "why not stateless everywhere?"

One area where the Chrome OS idea has yet to be used to full advantage is price.  With powerful conventional-OS laptops competing in the same price point, there is really no justification for the Chromebook to cost $500.  The Acer WiFi-only model is $349.  I think there could be explosive growth in the stateless idea when the lower cost benefits of the simpler model make it to the bottom line that consumers (individual and enterprise) pay.  

Please feel free to contact me with questions about my experience, or share your own in the comments. 

2 weeks with the Chromebook: stateless in practice, how is it to live with?

After taking delivery of the Samsung Chromebook on June 15, the day it went on sale, I used it throughout my business trip and vacation in California.   I've written that I believe stateless computing, represented in the marketplace by the Chromebook, is one of the most important technology trends.  So how is it to live with every day?

The good news is, for the most part, the Chromebook doesn't feel all that much different from using any laptop.  For routine work, the kind of thing I'm doing all day, I want a genuine keyboard and a larger display; the CB suits me fine.  I continue to really enjoy the unusually bright display and the extraordinary battery life. If you've ever trotted down the hall at work from one meeting to another with your laptop open because it takes so long to resume, you'd enjoy the Chromebook's resume from closed, which is instantaneous for all practical purposes, although it actually may take 2 seconds or so.  The boot-up time for a conventional computer now seems glacial compared to the 10 seconds it takes to launch the Chromebook from fully powered off.

As I mentioned in the last post, I wanted to see how life would be when you're not in range of a conventional WiFi connection.  I activated the included Verizon 3g service, which gives 100mb/month at no charge for 2 years; Using my normal range of 6 tabs for e-mail (Gmail and Yahoo), Facebook, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn, and the Infrics site, I went through 10 of those megabytes in under two hours.  So although the 3g service works, and is reasonably fast, I will only access it as a last resort.

So that brings up tethering. Newer releases of Android phones have a built-in hotspot capability; using my 4g Android phone (T-Mobile), I can bypass the Verizon limitation with a connection that is faster and included in my data plan already.  Where there is a good 4g signal, it works amazingly well. The CB sees the hotspot as it would any WiFi location,  and speeds are comparable to a broadband connection. However, in travels up and down coastal California, I found 4g availability really spotty: strong and reliable across LA and San Francisco, strangely absent at my conference in the Santa Clara Convention Center, where I had to shell out $13/day for WiFi in the heart of silicon valley.  Non-existent across big swaths of the 101 between both cities, and in points north of the bay area.   As I mentioned in my first comment on the Chromebook, I would find this just as limiting with my Windows laptop, but it illustrates how our ability to put powerful connections to use has not been matched yet by networks to support it.

In that first post, I also wondered about Microsoft's Office 365 on the Chrome OS; if Microsoft's application is web-based, would Google try to preserve market for Google Docs by limiting a competitor's functionality?  It turns out the limitation is on the other side; Microsoft does not offer a version of Office 365 that is compatible with Chrome OS, and it also requires a locally-installed copy of traditional Office for full functionality.  So while MS is making cloud-based strides, I don't see evidence that they take stateless application delivery seriously at this time.   If you are considering Chrome OS for enterprise use and must stay with Office, this could be a concern.

Chrome OS has a file manager, which offers some ability to manage "non-cloud" files, and some ability to use locally stored files while not connected to the internet.  It gives "unrecognized file type" if you double click on .doc, .ppt, or .xls files stored on an SD card (the CB has one SD slot), but it will directly open .pdf files without an import into Docs. It also will play some music and video files directly from local storage, using a media player applet.  It is possible to export ("download") a file from the Google Docs cloud to the local solid state storage built in to the machine, although I was unable to get the Chromebook to write anything at all to the SD card.  Whether the fact that unrecognized file types all seem to be those associated with Microsoft is a deliberate act or a shortcoming is a question that will be resolved with iterations of the OS.

The bigger point, though, is that the Chromebook is the first commercial expression of the stateless device idea; to judge it by performance on old-style fat OS standards is to miss the point.  Chromebook is a pleasure to use in almost all the situations in which I'd use a laptop computer, and it offers compelling benefits in terms of speed and simplicity.   I'm not giving up my Windows notebook just yet, but now that it and the Chromebook are side by side as I work, the big operating system will now be my second choice.

Next, as we continue to examine stateless computing in action, we'll consider technology triggers--enabling technologies--that will shape the way stateless evolves.  First, the explosive increase in need for reliable wireless broadband.  Second, the ways in which legacy makers of software and hardware approach stateless and cloud computing: will they kill a great idea to preserve existing profit models, will they evolve in time, or will some of today's big names end up as "wikitrivia," known only to diehard old-timers?

Quick report: a day with the new Samsung Chromebook

Amazon delivered the Chromebook I ordered a day earlier than I expected, I had it in my hands the day it was released to sale.  First impressions: good overall.

The Chromebook did boot up in seconds, as advertised, but I had to wait a couple of minutes to sign in while it did an OS update.  Last week, in anticipation of the Chromebook, I had set up my Chrome apps and imported Firefox bookmarks. All were there at once when I logged in, fulfilling the stateless device promise.

Notes:

• The display is dramatically bright and clear, a big plus. Screen and keyboard are plenty large to use as a primary computer.
• The trackpad, buttonless and using click-anywhere on the pad, is preferable to any I've used before. Two finger click equals right click, two-finger drag equals scrolling.
• The extra battery life is a revelation. I unplugged the Chromebook from the charger in mid-afternoon, used it the rest of the day and evening, and hadn't even  dropped to 50% battery life at the end of the evening.
• It does NOT do high resolution video well; a youTube 1080p video was jerky with stuttering sound, despite the fact that I let it cache ahead for the full length of the video
• Netflix is not enabled for Chromebook, although they promise it soon.  For the Chrome OS to suit me as a true everyday replacement for a traditional Windows laptop, I will want it to perform better as a video machine.  Amazon streaming video and the Amazon Cloud Player for music both worked perfectly first time out, however. 

I think the biggest insight to me is the realization that one of the main concerns I've seen raised about the "internet-or-nothing" idea has to do with worries over "what will I do if there's no internet connection."  It turns out that in practice, I'm already operating that way; so much of what I use a computer for is web-connected already that a machine with a traditional OS is already of little use to me unless I have a WiFi connection.  The very few exceptions, like word processing aboard a plane, will soon be addressed by offline capabilities in Google docs.  

I haven't tested Chromebook's built in 3g yet, and I also want to test the 4g hotspot ability of my Android phone with the Chromebook.  I'll report to you on both of those ASAP.  

What about you?  Google is pioneering the stateless concept--would the benefits be worth it to you?  Let me know.