Yesterday, Google released its highly anticipated Chrome OS, which pledges to revolutionize computing by moving every piece of data, from your personal documents to your applications, from your hard drive to the Web.

To this innovation, I say: “My money goes in a bank but I keep my data on a drive!”  Read on to learn about the history behind Google’s strategy and the great perils it poses to the freedom and vitality of computing.

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Google Launches Chrome OS

Google increased the pressure on its No. 1 competitor Microsoft yesterday by releasing its highly anticipated Chrome OS, an operating system designed to run on netbooks and other lightweight Internet-connected computers.  It’s main features?  A reported seven second boot time, fully automatic updates, constant syncing of personal data with Google’s servers, and most shockingly no software other than a stripped down version of the Linux and Google’s Chrome web browser.  All data and programs for Chrome OS reside on the Web and users are meant to exclusively make use of web applications such as Google Docs and Gmail, a wise strategy for a company whose growth relies on advertising revenue earned from visits to those sites.

This development has been treated by and large with optimism and a sense that Google is, once again, innovating for the better and setting the wave of the future.  What skepticism exists is aimed toward quelling hype, but no loud criticism has yet been leveled.  This is unfortunate, because Chrome OS is the crown jewel of a strategy being played by Google within larger historical forces that threaten to stifle innovation and stymie the freedoms personal computing has offered us for the past thirty years.

From Mainframes and Terminals to Home Computers: the Rise of the User’s Power

Google’s vision for Chrome OS is at the core of a corporate strategy that sees the future of personal computing as leading toward a completely Web-oriented experience, yet it is a strategy essentially inspired by a 60-year old model of computing: the mainframe.

During the 1950‘s and 60‘s, computers were colossal and exorbitantly expensive pieces of machinery, and only major businesses and universities could afford even one.  This arrangement severely limited user access until the advent of the mainframe-terminal system whereby each computer, or “mainframe”, was connected to several keyboards and monitors, or “terminals”, that were used to manipulate data, all of which was centrally stored.  (Today, the same basic relationship is called “client-server”, and on the Internet all web browsers are clients that retrieve websites that are centrally stored on servers across the world.)

As hobbyists and enthusiasts began to fiddle with their own computer systems in the 1970‘s, however, the industry realized a potential market for decentralized home systems which could be used for playing games, writing letters, and other tasks that seem familiar to us today.  They represented a critical evolutionary advance from digital technology’s hitherto centralizing tendency toward a new ideal, one that gave full power over one’s data to the user.

Like mainframes and terminals, these home systems or “personal computers” (PC’s) became linked to each other but more often as equal peers.  Early electronic bulletin board systems, for example, allowed client PC’s to connect to servers not only to download software but also to upload programs, data, and whatever else the user might want to share.

The sovereignty of each home computer was further cemented by the fact that these early connections were carried over slow and unreliable phone lines, which forced users to spend the majority of their time working on their data locally rather than on a remote server.  Finally, PC’s had become increasingly powerful and by the 1990‘s were fast and cheap enough to allow almost all applications that had once been the exclusive domain of mainframes to be run and managed by the user himself.

Bandwidth and Raw Power

The past five years have seen a remarkable reversal in those two important trends, however.  Broadband has become ubiquitous enough that the majority of Internet users have connections capable of accessing data and applications remotely while CPU and computer manufacturers, especially “netbook” manufacturers, have focused on energy efficiency over raw power.  These factors have led to a resurgence in the client-server model and today many users spend more time using “web applications” like Facebook or Google Docs than on their regular, PC counterparts.

Google’s Chrome OS thus enters a computing scene rapidly changing between paradigms, but what makes it so radical is the degree to which it proposes to supplant the PC model.  According to the press release, Chrome OS will consist of a stripped down version of the Linux operating system, a proven platform used to power PC’s and servers alike, that will boot straight into Google’s Chrome web browser without anything else–no antivirus, no Microsoft Office, no iTunes, just the Internet.  There will be a hard drive, but it will only be big enough to store the web browser and at any rate Chrome OS will not allow the user to store any personal data permanently on the computer.  Instead, all files will be continually synced with Google’s servers.

The argument is one of convenience and security.  “If you lose your computer, you don’t have to worry about backups because they’re already there for you.”  By the same token, your data will be available anywhere there is an Internet connection, which these days means nearly everywhere.  Google stands to profit from this because, naturally, it would direct even more traffic to its own web applications, from which it earns advertising revenue.

Data Isn’t Money: Freedom, Digital Creativity, and Solitude

Yet what is lost when allow servers to host all of our data and applications and we return to the days when we were dumb terminals?  We lose our bits that we fought so hard for, not only to keep but to be able to generate freely and control.  It has been confirmed that Chrome OS will only run on a limited selection of energy efficient and resource starved netbooks without any ability to, for example, compile a new application or act as a server.  Full control over our own data and our hardware, which means not only buying the components and computers that we prefer but also being able to manipulate them to their fullest extent, was at the core of the home computing vision of the 70‘s and the PC ideal of the 80‘s and 90‘s.

“Why would I ever need to compile my own programs?”, one might ask.  The value of freedom is never known until the freedom is lost.  Moreover, as a society we must be aware that even though we haven’t all used the freedom afforded to us by personal computers, those who have are responsible for the entire whole of computers as we know them.  Apple today, for instance, often restricts functionality for simplicity in their products, but it should be remembered that Steve Wozniak, the company’s co-founder, was able to design Apple’s first computers because he ready access to off-the-shelf personal computer components.p

Another issue with Chrome OS is its assumptions about the value of data.  Google, along with the rest of those heavily invested in web applications, seems to think that data is like money.  We would rather keep money in a bank than under a pillow because, indeed, it is far more convenient and safer that way, especially since our deposit is guaranteed by the government.  But money has no worth other than what society gives it, whereas data intrinsically worthy regardless of whether it is isolated or not.  Therefore, we need not worry about putting our money in a bank, because if society ever reaches a point where even the government cannot make good on its insurance guarantee then the money would have been worthless anyway.  With data on the other hand, we should be worried about not having our own local copy, because even if Google’s servers will never lose our files the fact that we don’t possess them can only be our loss.

Yet the most fundamental loss to computing that Chrome OS has to offer is the ultimate demise of our data’s solitude.  Before the spread of broadband our data was largely “locked up”, as some pundits and web application advocates would put it, on our PC’s.  That period, however, saw an unparalleled amount of creativity on every front of computing, especially in programming where the lack of frequent intermingling of data as well as the non-existence of any standardized API’s forced each developer to write their programs from scratch in their own unique manner.  This golden flowering of creativity was particularly evident in the user interfaces of graphical DOS programs, which tended to employ a much richer variety of colors and contrasts than we see today in most desktop environments, which come in shades of blue and gray.  It was the great explorer and writer Alexander von Humboldt who once wrote that every university needs freedom and solitude, and likewise Virginia Woolf who advised young women who wanted to write to secure $500 per month and a room of their own.  Regardless of physical capabilities, creativity always demands a degree of isolation.

Given the serious considerations above, we ought to think twice before adopting the Chrome OS platform not only because of any deficiencies or perhaps privacy or connectivity concerns, but because of what it stands for.  Should Chrome OS become the first truly successful attempt to replace the PC desktop with the client-server model, then others will inevitably follow suit and we may soon see the demise of the PC altogether.  Even Microsoft, that bastion of the PC world, is reported to be creating an online version of the Office application suite, that bulwark of PC functionality.

But until then, I’ll hang on to my bits and my hard disks with every bite of strength I have left!