Google Chrome OS and Splashtop
July 8th, 2009 by sergei
The announcement of the Google Chrome OS echoes what we are seeing with Splashtop - people want instant-on, easy to use, secure computing. Here is how the Google blog explained the motivations behind Chrome OS:
We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them.
We could not have said it better! Of course, the market has been moving towards instant-on computing for a while now, and DeviceVM has already seen tremendous success in the space: tens of millions of PCs already shipped with Splashtop, and our announced and shipping customers include HP, Acer, Sony, Lenovo, ASUS, and LG. By the end of 2010, Splashtop will be in the hands of more than 150M desktop, nettop, notebook, and netbook users.
Instant-on became possible because of the web. In the past, computing was all about heavy native applications. Today, most of what we do is in the browser, and “applications” are things like webmail. Focusing on web usage, Splashtop is able to get you started in seconds, unlike traditional operating systems. The web-based application framework that Google is developing for Chrome OS should further benefit Splashtop users. According to Google,
…new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux.
The world of web content and apps is diverse. Most popular services in China, for example, are quite different from those in the US (check out
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CN - Google.cn is in fourth place there). We have been working with a number of regional leaders to bring relevant web services to Splashtop users around the world. Stay tuned for more on that!