Chrome OS has stalled out

We live in a world where the Chromebook, and Chrome OS, should be thriving. But increasingly, it looks like Google’s cloud-first laptop platform has hit a dead end, and I’m not sure there are many available detours that can get it back on track.

Source: Chrome OS has stalled out

I don’t disagree too much with the author’s rants. In education, we are missing multimedia software: video editing, photo editing, a vector editor, and a music/sound editor. Hopefully, as Linux support is flushed out, these annoyances will be replaced with a full on applications. Then we can run OpenShot, Gimp, Inkscape, and Audacity. That’s going to be an amazing conference when I start seeing sessions on how open source software (OSS) is being used in the classroom. Yes, I know it is happening now, but with the switch to ChromeOS and Chromebooks, the uptake of OSS has declined.

Android support is barely an answer. It works fine for some messaging apps, but I usually end up using the web interface instead. 

Google has a “new shiny” problem, where products are being constantly replaced with other products. I can understand this, try a product first and see how it goes. That way you can head off any issues. The problem is that Google for some reason doesn’t want to add features to an app to fix the issues if Google feels the app is a dead end. They would rather start over from scratch.

Luckily for us, it doesn’t seem like ChromeOS and Chrome is not going to suffer the same fate anytime soon.