I’ve never said netbooks suck. I’ve said they’re the new cheap laptop, which is correct. And I’ve said that Apple should not make one, which I still believe. But I never said they sucked.

“A smaller, sub-$400 gadget with enough battery life that it doesn’t need a power cord run up to the coffee table sounds perfect for me, anyway — and I don’t care what OS it runs.”

Great. But now you’re talking about YOU, whereas your initial statement was about the more general population (“people”).

There are those perfectly happy with netbooks, which is fine; we all have different needs. But if Chrome OS is going to have anywhere near the impact some are claiming it will, it must have a far, far greater reach than current Linux/Windows netbooks do now. I believe the majority of consumers are not ready for that; those that are don’t need Chrome OS anyway.

So this really comes back to Tom’s same old “netbooks suck” song and dance. Clearly a netbook isn’t for Reestman or a lot of the penny-wise, dollar foolish folks who thought they were just buying a cheap, super-portable laptop.

Whether I need a powerful system (rarely) or not, my wife is using the desktop, anyway — so here I sit with a not-needed-for-work-anymore MBP that cost more than twice as much as the television I’m using as a primary activity, anyway. It’s like being that guy at the trailer park with a pickup truck nicer than his own home. A smaller, sub-$400 gadget with enough battery life that it doesn’t need a power cord run up to the coffee table sounds perfect for me, anyway — and I don’t care what OS it runs.

I don’t think the new OS will take the world by storm and endanger any of the major players. But there certainly is a target audience for which the OS will be exactly the thing they need. The only non-web apps my wife uses are video and music players… which will certainly be in Chrome OS, web-based or not. And I know of more people who use their computers that way.

People expect stuff to just work and may be okay with web apps crashing or not working quite right because they’re beta, but when your netbook crashes or doesn’t recognize a USB device or work with Bluetooth, will they be so forgiving?

Certainly, some are. But it doesn’t mean they’re not also happy with their desktop apps. It also doesn’t mean they’re in a position to rely on the web 24/7, whether it’s because of unavailability, or economics, or something else.

This is not just about web apps, it’s about the entire netbook package as it would exist in Chrome OS.

This is not just going to be a tabs-in-a-browser-window scheme. Fluid.app is maybe an introduction of the shell experience to expect.

People are perfectly happy with web apps. The popularity of applications like Facebook, Salesforce, and Gmail demonstrates that as a fact, and anything that doesn’t give them the red-headed stepchild iPhone treatment will do just fine.

The applications will be better, i.e. one step above the desktop browser experience. Google knows a thing or two about how to build them, and they’d be crazy not to make their extensions work beautifully with existing sites.

I think a main reason for the “consumers to go there” is not so much about the OS or Google as about a ubiquitous internet with reasonable fees and coverage.

For many people it’s still to expensive to be online 24/7 AND on-the-move – even if there is 3G flat rate plans as low as $25 a month here where I line.

For me a kind of “country wide WiFi” is a killer app – not to mention the same on global basis. It’s painfully bad to travel internationally hoping to find a accessible network…

Personally I’d prefer Linux on a netbook, but the manufacturers virtually killed this by going for separate niche Linux distributions that have far less available software than Ubuntu, SUSE, etc – it’s possible this is being fixed now with Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Moblin, but it may be too late.

If it takes Google to popularise a Linux-based OS (which is what Chrome OS is, it has a Linux kernel) on netbooks as a real alternative to Windows, I hope they succeed. Particularly if it’s a safer, easier thing to recommend to non-techie friends, compared to the nightmare of Windows stability, viruses, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens… if Chrome OS does get some traction, it will be a great help to Linux by ensuring hardware support, and you should be able to very easily install a standard Linux on top of any Chrome-based netbook.

Google’s claim that their OS will be free of security issues has been called out as idiotic, and so it is – but gullible people might believe it for a while, just as gullible still believe that Apple’s OSX is more secure than Vista, not knowing that obscurity (small market share) is not a kind of security.

I’m not surprised that Google pulled out that sly criticism of Microsoft, however mendacious, because it appears to still work for Apple. I don’t think Google can get away with comparing their stuff to Windows 98 as if Windows 98 were shipping today, though – Apple has saturated that marketing message IMO.