Sorry Google. I'm not ready for life in the clouds

At some point in the not-distant future, desktop computing and the OS as we know it will cease to exist. We'll all be living merrily within the cloud, where music, e-mail and everything else imaginable will be available from anywhere at a click.

With its announcement of a Chome OS, Google is certainly aiming to give us all a hearty shove into that future. "It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be," the search-engine giant writes. Indeed.

Now is not that time, however, and it will take a significant shift before Google's OS becomes anything more than a niche player.

Which is why, as my colleague points out, targeting netbooks for the first release makes perfect sense. These little portables don't have he power to run resource-intensive desktop applications, and so are tailor-made for a user who spends the vast majority of their time online.

A major stumbling block in the further "webification" of our digital lives - at least in Canada - will be the networks on which Google's OS will operate. Internet service providers are already suggesting that their networks are overloaded, and are defending their need to manage, or throttle, certain types of Web traffic. But if Rogers and Bell are already complaining about the strain of HD video and BitTorrent traffic, how likely is it that they'll welcome even more data-intensive applications with open arms? In any case, it's little wonder that Google has taken a signifigant interest in the CRTC's Web traffic hearings this past week. If Chrome OS has any hope of breaking into the mainstream, ISPs and regulators will have to be on board. If I'm shifting my work, media and even gaming to a Web-centric OS, I'll expect speeds comparable to my more conventional Mac or Windows machine. And it'll have to be reliable. Without that, the proposal is dead on arrival.

There are also some basic societal hurdles to overcome. People still like owning music, for instance, even if it's in digital form alone, and especially because Canada lacks a viable equivalent to services like Pandora and Hulu. We're not ready for life in the clouds.

But don't take my word for it. Here's a selection of some of the best from today's discussion on Chrome OS:

Ars Technica: The cloud is only useful if it's accessible, and staying online isn't always convenient or cheap at this stage. The new offline storage capabilities in the latest Web standards certainly limit the impact of temporary disconnection and, by controlling the whole software stack, Google has the opportunity to make sure its applications play nicely when the computer happens to be offline.

Digital Daily: The privacy implications are, of course, horrendous. And while Google will inevitably dismiss such concerns as paranoid and argue that any data the company might collect at the OS level will be used only to improve its services and benefit users, it should still give us all pause.

Gizmodo: I can almost see a day where phones run Chrome OS, too, when wireless internet is truly ubiquitous. It seems obvious, now, that this is Google's long-haul play

And some conflicting views from the fellows at TechCrunch:

John Biggs: ChromeOS isn't a threat. In fact it's not even on Microsoft's radar. It's nice that Google is offering their philanthropic OS for all and sundry (incidentally, what are the tax implications of this kind of project?) But can it beat Windows? No and never.

Michael Arrington: Microsoft has a very serious competitive threat to the core of their revenues. Every Chrome computer bought won't have Windows and won't have Office. That must send chills down the spine of the guys up in Redmond.