Given my defense of Joe Wilcox over several posts earlier, you'll probably find it curious that I'm finding myself disagreeing with him, and many others as it has become conventional wisdom, over the Chrome OS. I was going to write something at length on this, but Farhad Manjoo, Mike Elgan and a recovering "Fake Steve Jobs" already made the major points I was thinking.
But briefly, Google's Chrome presupposes that all one needs to do can be done online, over the internet. For a few people, that may be true, but if you do anything more than email, type up memos, Twitter, or blog, the cloud isn't going to support you. For instance, I've been doing a lot more stuff with drawing and photographs, and there is really no cloud-equivalent to CorelDraw or Photoshop or even IPhoto and Windows Photo. If you want to turn raw video into something presentable, you'll need a heavy OS for a while to come. Dumb terminals are typical too dumb for people with even intermediate level interests. In fact, the closest "cloud device" to become a success -- Apple's iPhone -- owes part of its success to the fact it can run programs not of the cloud.
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