Told ya!
I have been talking about this idea for some time and Google confirmed it on their blog last night. The are releasing their own Operating System in the form of a browser: Google Chrome OS.
What I find interesting right now is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Google has been the powerhouse search engine for years and now MS has released Bing to compete. Microsoft even offers up television commercials touting the new search engine and to make the word “Bing” part of our vocabulary. Sneaky and yet Bing is Google without advertisements.
The design of an OS was really to create a graphic interface to show a person how a computer is accessing data and storing it. However, with Web 2.0 and resources stored online there won’t be a use for hard drive storage and an OS. The applications are online now. The files are online now. What do I need a hard drive for? What do I need an OS for? Why do I need to keep paying Microsoft for an OS that will cost half the price of the laptop?
The new OS is touted as lightweight and will be designed to run on netbooks. I had written before about SkyTone’s netbook that runs the Google Android OS and costs $100.
When the Google OS is available and netbooks in the US cost around $100, what does this mean for 1:1 ratios? In towns where the population is less than 30,000? In towns looking to create a ring wireless network around the entire city to provide portal access to city and district resources?
July 8th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Great conversation to have. I think we will se this happen in our “school life time”. The cost will eventually make it affordable. However, there are governmental factors that have to be changed in order to make this happen. I know my district relies heavily on eRate funding. It is my understanding that eRate limits what you can do and who can use your eRate funded access to the Internet. I know the infrastructure can be built with bond funds but I see that there needs to be a shift in how state and federal funding programs allow districts and municipalities to collaborate and leverage funding sources with one another.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:02 am
I agree. There are some serious limitations with this type of funding. But there are alternative funding sources. For example, each county can apply for Homeland Security funding to unite services like this in the attempt to provide better security for a municipality. Texas alone gets over $60 million for money to be used to unite communications between city resources. (see http://www.dhs.gov/xgovt/grants/states/texas.shtm)
One of my first tasks here was to have lunch with all the local technology directors. I wanted to meet others in the area who were dealing with similar issues we have. We get together once every 2 months to share common headaches, talk about what we are working on, share vendor information, and see what we can do to help each other out. We are developing in-house disaster recovery scenarios to assist each other. And we have our own private Wiki where we share ideas with one another.
It has been really helpful because we all want to do things to help the community. We just thought we were alone in doing it. Together, we can do so much more. Our templates have come from http://digitalelpaso.com/ and http://www.onlykaty.com/. We see how the web can unite our services but our community doesn’t have viable web access or even home computing. Yet, we all have a recycling problem with our older computers. So we are working on ideas to share resources with our community and combining forces to help out. Funding restrictions aside, we are developing plans and seeing what we can do with what we have.