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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Four months after announcing it is developing an operating system, Google (www.google.com) has for the first time publicly demonstrated the highly anticipated Chrome OS, which will heavily rely on web applications and cloud storage.
According to PC World, Chrome OS's strengths, much like browser predecessor Chrome, will be its speed, simplicity, and security. While the Chrome browser can be run in a desktop environment that can run client apps and store files on a hard disk, the Chrome OS is one big step away from a typical operating system.
First off, it is designed for computers, typically netbooks, that boot from solid-state disks, and forgo hard disks altogether in favor of cloud storage.
And, secondly, it will only run web applications -- so, for instance, instead of Adobe Photoshop, Chrome users will look to apps like Google's Picasa. This has the potential to spur developers into creating powerful web-based equivalents to client apps, not to mention the infrastructure to support them.
More than anything, however, the new details of Chrome OS have many bloggers wondering if the world is ready for an operating system that operates almost entirely online -- and they don't seem very optimistic. PC World notes that many are not ready to cut themselves entirely off from local apps and storage, and there remains the question of how Chrome OS will function when there is no Internet connectivity.
An InfoWorld article goes further to the root of the problem -- that the Chrome OS simply lacks flexibility. "Google has thrown out the one characteristic that made Windows and, to a lesser extent, Mac OS X and full-blown Linux successful: flexibility," writes InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy. Sacrificing flexibility for simplicity, however, has worked for certain products such as the Flip camera, yet the challenge remains for web developers to ensure that web apps are not just "good enough," but are legitimate programs in their own right.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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