Larry Page’s Q&A was excellent yesterday, well worth hunting down. And he took a few jabs about standards too: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584678-93/larry-page-disses-microsoft-for-milking-google-for-its-own-benefit/ (admittedly after Google just forked WebKit!)

Google demoed a simple, multiplayer racing game running across web browsers in Android phones and tablets and iPhones and iPads. That kind of platform free concept is the future once data speeds are both reliable and fast enough.

Of course this idea is what Firefox’s entirely mobile OS is built around so there is some momentum.

Anyways, talking about Chrome OS. I was shocked to hear such a praised review by Jason Calacanis in ThisWeekIn. Here’s the clip at the right time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=m4FY3r3neIM#t=4047s

But immediately the natural response is, what about all the native apps you need? Then it dawned on me that the Pixel DOES support native apps. That is what NativeClient is all about.

https://developers.google.com/native-client/

..a bit of searching revealed I wasn’t the only one understanding Google’s plans here.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/22/google-ports-quickoffice-to-native-client-for-chrome-will-launch-with-full-editing-features-in-about-3-months/

…the games launched on this new technology is also already promising.
https://developers.google.com/native-client/community/application-gallery

So it turns out Chrome OS is really about Native, just with a safer, sandboxed and unusual twist.
With the distinct (initial) failure that is Windows 8, demonstrating that there is a real divide between touch & production suites, Chrome OS may really be a unique offering from Google, than can offer both production and safety from Viruses/malware/slowness that traditional operating systems suffer from WITH the ability to port native apps over.

To be honest I think Google has surprised everyone with I/O this year given the lack of Android 4.3/5.0 and any Nexus hardware.

That said they are easily released later in the year. What excites me about yesterday’s announcements, however, is they all unify Google products. Rather than giving phone makers another firmware update to work on (while they already struggle to get to 4.2) the features are universal: upgradeable core apps, gaming platforms, streaming music services, mapping, unified messaging and enhanced developer tools for everyone on Android. Whether Android can be truly unified is still up in the air, but this was a launch about bringing the disparate parts of Google closer together rather than widening the gap.

I’ll be writing an editorial about it later

However, as someone who only now has finally understood the Chrome OS strategy, I think that this will also be part of Google I/O. Further, once I got it, I had to sit back and think: This is extremely ambitious and if they get it right, extremely powerful.

Psssst. If you respond to this with “..but it doesn’t run native apps”, then you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle in your assessment

DMG

You might like this – http://www.unwire.com/about/news/say-what-you-will-sms-is-alive-and-kicking/.