Friday Morning Links > Why Chrome OS will fail -- big time

Fatal flaw No. 1: The Linux foundation
From power management to display support, Linux has long been a minefield of buggy code and half-baked device driver implementations. Google recognizes this fact and, in a page out of the Apple Macintosh playbook, has taken the draconian measure of allowing the Chrome OS to be distributed exclusively on a series of as-yet-undisclosed netbook-like devices.

Fatal flaw No. 2: The Web user interface
Unlike a traditional OS, there's no desktop. The "applications" running under the Chrome OS are really just interactive Web pages, with the Chrome browser's tabs serving to separate and organize them visually on the screen.

The world won't buy an inflexible OS
And that's where I believe the Chrome OS ultimately fails. In its effort to pare the traditional OS model down to the bone, Google has thrown out the one characteristic that made Windows and, to a lesser extent, Mac OS X and full-blown Linux successful: flexibility. Simply put, the Chrome OS is too narrow. It assumes that the world is ready to give up the traditional personal computing paradigm and live full time in the cloud. In reality, most users prefer a hybrid existence, with some of their data and applications stored locally, and others -- typically the freebies, like Gmail -- hosted online.

Don't forget that Google's plans for acceptable hardware to run the Chrome OS is very limiting. No hard drives or even DVD drives; only solid state drives. That may reduce power usage and speed up boot time (as if that was really an issue), but it also means you can't run your own apps, or store and access data, when you don't have a live Internet connection. Plus, the supported laptops are only netbook-size laptops, with low-power CPUs that won't be all that capable.