Google - what happened??
In continuation to this post by Eran Kampf: http://www.developerzen.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome-is-google-replacing-my-os-again/
I originally thought about a simple reply but it came out so long that I ended up making this a formal post.
Long long time ago people came up with the idea of working remotely without any hard drive on the machine.
Since then came AJAX because people did not like the user experience of browsers, and online content failed almost completely. People did not want to pay for a song that is "somewhere out there", for the right to see a movie but not own it, and for working on their documents (some times sensitive) without receiving their own copy.
Google woke up one day and decided to do that... for some reason. It's probably a nice browser.
Originally movie producers thought that DVDs would take away all revenue. Today the movie is just a promotion for the DVD. The reason is that people feel better when they own the things that they like. When you put effort in a document you like it. Ask any developer that wrote a feature that needs to be taken out of the application.
The two basic rules I have for you are:
1. It takes at least two dots to make a line, and
2. Never argue with the way customers feel about things.
I had another interesting experience related to this: a while back I noticed that MSDN searches suggest common keywords and thought to myself: that it is an amazing feature, that it is about time that the online version did what the offline version does, and that this has to be pretty heavy to download... A few days ago I noticed the same feature on Google search... "Hmm..." I though to myself, and was wondering how heavy download was this and were do they keep this information hidden (not a big issue, it's just not interesting enough to open a tool for it).
Funny how the wheel turns...
Asaf