Google Shakes It Up With Chromebooks

It's true, I have been known to put a lot of faith into the humungoid churning Internet-driver that is "Google." Gmail is by far the best email app out there, Google Docs, amazing and even little things like Google powered phone numbers are wonderful gems. However, I realize that many people don't feel this way. They believe that Google is watching over all of their porn emails, selling advertising to their friends, and listening in on every conversation that you make to your call girl while using Voice. With all this, I wonder what everyone is saying about Google's recent Chromebook announcement.

Tim Simonte (can't seem to find much on him or I would link) wrote a very interesting piece for MIT's Technology Review focusing on six reasons why these new notebooks from Google are a "bad idea."

1. Tom thinks that because the Chromebook doesn't support iPod integration (I believe Tom means overall Apple integration, ala iTunes) many people will waiver on the purchase. Did Google say that there wouldn't be iPod integration? Nope. Sure, you can put a lot of money on the fact; however, it simply isn't one...yet. If it were true and if Macstories were to correctly slug their posts, or just add a year to the date, the iPod commands 76 percent of the market. Wait, lets scrap the numbers game, there has been a sizeable crowd spreading rumors about cloud syncing in the next iOS. Why couldn't we connect to our Apple music locker through webdav and place mp3's in it, then sync them back to our iDevice family?
2. At 349-430$ these guys are simply too expensive. Tom's right, those are some expensive numbers; however, Google also said that they would lease them at 20$ for students and 28$ for businesses on a per monthly basis. Wow, 20 measily bones a month for a laptop when I was in college would have been awesome. Plus, after a certain amount of time, Google could send the user a brand new laptop and the user would send their old one back to Google. This is unconfirmed however, most PC leasing programs reflect this already. 20$ a month plus access to new and better hardware when it becomes available? Sounds pretty sweet to these ears.
3. Ok he has a point here: people aren't ready for the cloud. Mainly because they are pansies, scared that their illegitimate children's ssn might make it back to their current family, or got burned by the recent Amazon outage. The fact is, a cloud OS doesn't mirror the same functionality we are used to in our current computer OSs. It lives somewhere else, on someone else's servers, under someone else's control. You don't have to worry about updates, bugs (Tom thinks different), migrating data to new computers, etc...really the list is too long and warrants it's own post. Just think of all the cool stuff you could accomplish if viruses, malware, and updates weren't top of mind?
4. Tom thinks the security in ChromeOS is "better, but much worse." Two factor authentication is where you have a username and password along with a separate numerical number that is constantly changing. Once the user imputs a correct username and password, they need to imput the random number that is currently marked as "valid." These numbers are usually handed to the user through an app on your phone or in the form of a small fob. There are only two applications that I use that have this kind of authentication built in: World of Worcraft and my Google account. Right Tom...
5. "Google can't do hardware and support." Yep, this is Tom's only striking point. Does anyone remember the 3g issues that were apparent with the Nexus 1? Yeah, the big G had a hell of a time getting their support figured out.
6. "Google gets too much control." This was taken care of several paragraphs before with the words: pansie and porn. Actually, I should just rename this whole post to: "Pansies and Porn."