Google should make an operating system.

[Aleksandr(Sasha)]

Basically, once I wanted to make a suggestion to Google about bettering Writely. So now I'm a little older, and decide that I can probably make an intelligent argument on behalf of it. So I go to writely.com, and, lo and behold, it has been changed to EXACTLY what I wanted to suggest for it to be changed to. So, inspired by this, I decided to post the suggestion that Google make an operating system, another suggestion I've been wanting to make.

So, in making a dominating operating system, there are three factions you want to please (of course it's a little more complicated than this). They are:
1. Normal everyday person: these are where the bulk of MS's profit comes from.
2. Intelligent MS diehards: these are slowly changing over to other factions as MS removes the options and adds increasing levels of menus to get to the options. In fact, I was just changing permissions on Vista the other day: it requires Right-click=>Properties=>Security=>Advanced=>Edit=>Edit= >Change checkboxes=>OK=>OK=>OK=>OK. 11 steps for a simple operation. In fact, opening cmd and using icacls is quicker. But enough of that, more of elaboration.
3. Anti-MS pros: these do not like MS's stuff, some b/c it's expensive, and recently, MS has been trying to emulate Firefox by changing IE, Writely by making three levels of menus in MS Office, &c., to try vainly to win these people over.

So how do you reconcile these three? The recent trend is customization.
Set defaults for faction 1, who would not know to change it, to make them happy. So have "Themes" for faction 2 (non-tabbed browsing, Classic WINDOWS appearance, without stupid search bars everywhere that don't even work always) and for faction 3(multitabbed browsing, but each tab as a child of the parent, so a critical error in one tab would be handled and would not cause the remainder of the tabs/windows to exit out; semitransparent windows with rounded corners, &c.). Also there would be individual customizations for the appearance of even little parts, but all nested within a single program and appliable with one theme file: from appearance of folders, browser, and taskbar, to the character set which non-unicode programs use for ASCII > 128, to picky stuff like whether desktop.ini shows up on your desktop when hidden and system files are set to show: basically all appearance.
But appearance alone does not a success make.
You also need another category of customizations for what runs. For example, generally VISTA runs some 40 services, out of which only 10 are practical to have always running, and about 10 more occasionally serve a purpose. So once again have some customizations:
For faction 1, set the 20 generally needed services (of course it would be something different, but synonymous) to run: it would be faster, and faster makes faction 1 happy.
For faction 2, enumerate what services do. For example, I had the Software Licensing service turned off, so I could not open the control panel, run services.msc to turn it back on or even to open msconfig to see which service is off. So knowing what something does when you turn it off helps.
For faction 3, simplify adding new startup items (of course, since they do not have to be services, you could stick Firefox Quick Start and stuff in there).
Moreover, provide information on memory utilization: people would be happy if they knew that leaving, say, Firefox Quick Start on would take up more memory than Print Spooler and WIA (scanner) (once again, called something else) put together, even though the latter are two services, and Firefox is but one. This would allow the factions 2 and 3 to gauge accurately what they can save time on by leaving off. i.e. if Firefox Quick Start saves 10 sec but makes everything run 10% slower, they'd be better off leaving it off if they do not use it every 100 sec.

For the hard drive, when people buy it, make a part of it on Google's servers. For example, if they buy 200GB worth of memory, allow for 120GB of it be on their hard drives, and 80GB on the internet. The PC can store everything actually necessary to boot up and get it running, plus large files; the internet can store everything else. The people who are too poor to have connections to the internet would probably not be picky enough to need the customizations. However, to be safe:
When they buy the PC, they only pay for whatever is actually on the hard drive, and they are told how much it would cost to get the remainder from the internet. If they wish, they may retain everything on the hard drive. If they connect, their unnecessary files are deleted and-- here's the trick-- their space quota gets filled with however much the files take, while Google can keep the same set of files for everyone, thus saving space. Moreover, by hosting the online storage, Google can benefit from the fact that most people do not use up all of their space.
So basically, people would store large files, such as movies and MP3s, on the PC: downloading them from the internet every time would take too long. They would store documents and such on the internet: not only would downloading them not take much time, but also they can download them from other PCs, thus removing the need for USB drives and such. People can use the online hard drive to store space-consuming stuff they seldom use or to transfer large files from PC to PC. For example, I still retain the 30some GB of old school files, PC programs, mail, &c. that I might do with storing online. Because the locally-stored files would be large, the searching for files locally by name would not take long; searching locally by content would not be necessary under normal circumstances b/c the files would be music or whatnot rather than documents; and searching online would be instantaneous even by file content, due to Google's fast servers. Moreover, any time-consuming operations could be executed on Google at a higher speed than most PCs can afford, so long as it is not done more often than, say, 3 hours a day at 16GB equivalent of RAM. So they would get a 2GB average speed, so as not to overload the servers, but simultaneously they would have the capability to execute instantaneous operations at ridiculously high speeds, which would help greatly if they are in the process of, say, solving some equation on Mathematica. (of course I'm not exactly sure how fast and everything Google's servers are, so this is just an example.) And the best part of having the online resources? "More space at the speed of a click." "Faster speed with a single click." Make buying storage and RAM quota possible.

So to convince faction 1 to buy it, the most important thing you would want is quick speed and cheap price. The quick speed is effected by not running all services and such: even with a 1GB RAM, the PC can load faster than 2GB Vista if it only has the essential elements. In fact, it would not be bad if the PC graphics loaded very quickly, right after the mandatory services, and then 50% of the CPU speed is allocated to getting the essential background services (i.e. DHCP Client (internet), all internet services including browsers, then less essential services such as Print Spooler) started while the user does whatever. The cheap price can be specifically chosen so as to try to outcompete MS: moreover, it can be afforded if not everyone uses all of the online space, which would allow some machines to be off and their maintenance not necessary. This is the way the hard drives would be layed out: in the My Computer (or whatnot), there would be a regular, C drive, with a regular, hard drive icon. And there would be the D drive, with a cool-looking icon (I'm sure Google can find better statistics than I to see what is cool-looking). This would be enough to convince most of faction 1 to use it. And then there's the part of faction 1 that is overly concerned about privacy. Let them and those too poor to have internet keep the hard drive and resources they have, and not need to pay more than a regular MS PC would cost. And make sure you emphasize that it is cheaper and faster in your commercials, to get their attention. Most of the time these do not have strong preferences, and when they need to get a PC, they just go out and buy what's cheap and fast, and others' claims sway these people a lot.
Then there's the matter of satisfying faction 2. But they're already disillusioned with MS, so anything that would allow them to go back to the way WINDOWS used to be would be a motive strong enough for a lot of them to switch.
And last, we have faction 3. These are very diverse, and there is no one way of satisfying them. While I made sure they would not be dissatisfied, I have no way of converting these, that would be up to Google. Apparently users of Apple are not concerned about price, and they would not want to go without internet merely to protect self's privacy.
So, then there's the issue of a FS. So far as customizable security goes, NTFS has an ideal FS. If it is copyrighted, I'd get as close to the way its security options are as the copyright would permit.
The OS could be called Google OpErating System (GOES). (This would be a foil to the car company that made cars called Nova to sell in the Spanish-speaking Latin America. While Nova was meant to be a reference to the Terra Nova, "New Land", original name for America, in Spanish "No va" means "does not go": not very good name for a car.)
Sorry I have to stop adding and abbreviate b/c msg is too long.

[[ugly_cat]]

dear Aleksandr(Sasha)
thanks for interesting post.
now,Google was developing OS

[Aleksandr(Sasha)]

1. Thank you to mods for approving that.
2. So, basically, the article describes a general outline, something only fit as an integrand of all of the Google features, plus the ability to run without WINDOWS. What I was suggesting is actually to make a computer that would sell with Google's Operating System. So that people wouldn't have to pay for WINDOWS *and* have to get Google's OS. Moreover, that would open up many possibilities of what Google can do with the computer, namely the online storage I described, and possibly other features. Now then, I have more suggestions about how the security policy, &c. would be layed out, but I figured I better wait to see how my suggestion goes with Google before enumerating the remainder of the specifics that would make it appealing to all three categories described.

[x3mario]

Nice find proof ugly_cat.

[searchmaster]

Good one shasha

[Ka-canor]

Nice to know that, I hope its out on the market.

[[ugly_cat]]

Originally Posted by searchmaster

Good one shasha

yes,.shasha will become good poster of GC,at the future.