Doug-at-large

There is an interesting, balanced take on Chrome OS – why it is relevant and why it is irrelevant at:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21004&tag=nl.e550

I lean towards the skeptical points mentioned.

You know, as experience showed with the iPhone when it was first released, users just wanted to do more with the device than Apple first envisioned and thus were forced to create a SDK and allow apps to be created for it – not just the original “web apps.” People found the web apps to be too limiting.

I think that people who buy even portable netbooks will not be satisfied by being constrained by a browser and web apps and are inevitably going to want to be able to run apps directly on their devices. I don’t believe that the future is entirely in the cloud. I think it will be a mix.

I think Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) is a good vision of the future – a mix of a very cool local client that works on Mac, Windows, iPhone and other mobile devices, combined with a cloud version that lets you synchronize and also access your data in a very nice web interface. Plus you can choose which data to synchronize, which to publish to the outside world and which to keep local on your own device in 100% privacy. And it just has really cool features.

That model is the best of both worlds I think.

doug