The Macalope thinks he’s finally cracked the code.
For years he’s read these horrible lists of X number of reasons why product Y will fail, or why product Z is your new boyfriend now, and wondered what the authors of these pieces were thinking. But now he gets it. The X number of reasons are part of a much larger list of N reasons, and N – X reasons all disprove whatever the person’s saying will happen. And, the Macalope surmises, the author always meant to get to the N – X reasons why product Y will succeed, but just didn’t manage to because they received a blow to the head and had amnesia for three years.
Right? It’s gotta be that. Otherwise, how else to explain Christopher Dawson’s “5 reasons everyone will be using Chrome OS in 3 years” (tip o’ the antlers to E. Wetzell)
This is a perfect example of the problems with this genre. While you might manage to pull five reasons while Chrome will soon be ubiquitous out of your butt, you can come up with 100 why it won’t without even standing up.
While Dawson admits Chrome is off to a slow start, he thinks it’s just getting warmed up:
However, in computer-land, three years is forever, and in that period of time, I expect that Chrome OS will be all over the enterprise, consumer spaces, schools, and SMBs.
It’s possible, but does it warrant such one-sided fan fiction?
According to Dawson, Chrome will be cheap and flexible. Did you know you can run software in Chrome right in the browser? The Macalope has been promised this pie in the still-mythical always-on Internet sky for years, yet somehow all the nice joints still have native applications on the menu. And the lousy ones.
Now, if the Macalope were ZDNet, this would be about where he’d break this column into a second page like Dawson did, because everyone knows that while browsers are powerful enough to run desktop-level applications, they can’t handle more than 500 words of a column at a time.
What’s that? You’re saying that it’s not about word count, it’s about showing ads? Ahhh. Kind of like how Google makes its money. Which it’ll need to do with Chrome, too. That’s presumably on the other list that Dawson will get to sometime next BONK! WHO AM I?
Dawson predicts that Chrome and Android will merge, as if that’s some kind of advantage and makes any sense architecturally and doesn’t affect the points he listed previously.
If Google has proved anything, it’s that they have enough money to keep hammering away at a market until they own it.
Aaaaaaand then what?
Profit?
[looks around, does not find profit]
5. Because the web will be all you need
Yay, always-on Web! Always-on Web is friend to children and will defeat Guiron!
This webification movement has taken off in the last 18 months. It isn’t hard to imagine what the next three years will do to the way we think about personal computing. So while Chrome OS got off to a slow start, it’s only a matter of time until Google can take advantage of this inflection point at which we find ourselves.
Don’t! Stop! Be-lievin’!
We will probably get to that promised land some day, but given the current market position of existing vendors, and the fact that cellular providers couldn’t provide large amounts of bandwidth at decent prices to save their lives, three years is probably aggressive.
Oops. Sorry. He keeps bringing up items from that “other” list.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]