Cloud Computing With Google Chrome?

September 12, 2008

Hurricane … er, tropical storm Hanna probably was a bit of a disappointment to those of you who are extreme weather junkies, but storm-force winds or no, the brief downpour that we had in the Washington, D.C., area managed to knock out my little corner of the electrical grid. So I’m been compelled to camp out in the coffee shop of a nearby Borders bookstore and contend for one of the precious few three-prong outlets that are available for recharging the laptops and cell phones of the uprooted, information-starved horde. But enough of one man’s lament. Let’s turn instead to a more universal — or nearly so — problem: Microsoft Windows.

Believe it or not, there is a logical thread here, because Windows has a lot in common with the weather. Like the latter, everybody complains about the most kludgy, temperamental and ubiquitous of operating systems, while knowing full well that there’s nothing we can do about it. As I’ve written about previously, those woes have been exacerbated by the coming of the dreaded Windows Vista, with its annoying habit of continually asking permission to perform functions, its demands that we download new drivers for peripherals, and its capricious-at-best compatibility with software that doesn’t have “Microsoft” on the label. OK, so we could join the fringe that has defected to the Mac OS, but that would mean overcoming our aversion to expensive, unnaturally white computers, buying all new software and possibly even getting WWSJD (“What Would Steve Jobs Do?”) vanity license plates.

But now, there’s another possibility, a tantalizing vision of a future in which Windows — or the Mac OS — might no longer matter. A world in which we not only won’t have to worry about whether our software is compatible with our OS, but in which we won’t ever have to install any software again, period. A world in which we’ll be able to do just about everything we need, from updating a spreadsheet to editing digital photos, inside the borders of a platform-agnostic browser. I’m talking about cloud computing, in which software will actually run on distant Internet servers, rather than our PCs.