The Open EDge

As anyone who reads my blog or follows me on Twitter knows, I'm not a particular fan of Apple's iPad. I find it to be too big, too expensive, too locked down, and too beholden to the whims and restrictions (DRM, etc) of one company. They have been largely oversold, with pundits of all sorts positioning them as the holy grail of technological invention, falsely predicting that they will summarily squash less expensive, more capable rival technologies in one fell swoop. And why wouldn't they say such things? After all, tablets combined with tightly-controlled, proprietary ecosystems represent the last, best hope for the "pay-for-play" model of media and content providers who have been decimated by the liberation of information on the web. "These are awesome! You really should buy one!" is really a cover for regaining the ability to control what you see, what you do, and how you consume content and media.

Much has been made over the last few days of the recently announced (you could say, finally announced) ChromeOS notebook from Google. While this may seem like a new release, ChromeOS has actually been in active development for quite some time under the Chromium project, That said, the recent unveiling revealed more than just software, it also revealed Google's future plans and strategy for this tiny OS. So does ChromeOS bring a new revolution to the portable computing table? And does the Google strategy make sense, either short term or long term? Let's take a look, beginning with the technology.