Google on Tuesday showed off new details of its forthcoming Chrome operating system. The company also announced a pilot project under which qualified consumers, developers, educators and businesses will receive a free Chrome-powered laptop dubbed the Cr-48 between now and January.
Though Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others had envisioned building computers that could run applications remotely over networks back in 1997, it has taken more than 13 years for the underlying technologies to emerge.
“This is a journey we have been talking about for a very long time,” Schmidt said. “With Chrome OS we have the development of a viable third choice on the desktop” that is strong enough, scalable enough, and fast enough.
Running Apps Remotely
Google and Citrix Systems are already developing software to enable machines running Chrome OS and Citrix Receiver to access a wide variety of business applications that reside in private clouds, noted Citrix Senior Vice President Gordon Payne. There are major benefits in “having both the apps and the data secure in the data center,” Payne said. “This will be available in the first half of next year.”
Businesses are interested in such features because they offer significant advantages in security, simplicity and total cost of ownership, noted Google Vice President Sundar Pichai. Many CIOs would rather spend their IT budgets “on high-value opportunities” rather than on IT personnel configuring computers, running updates, or installing patches, he observed. “The TCO is a couple of orders of magnitude” lower than on standard PCs, Pichai added.
Chrome OS will include several security enhancements, such as the automatic encryption of all data. Machines running the new OS also will feature a verified boot that “takes the core initial part of the OS and puts it on the device in read-only firmware, which no software can modify” without “physical access to…