This past weekend I had the pleasure of meeting David Liu, the founder of Good OS. You might have heard of them when they partnered with Everex to offer a sub $200 desktop called the gPC. The gPC runs on a stripped down Linux-based operating system customized to leverage online applications accessed through the web browser – genius. When I took a look at their interface, I instantly noticed icons for Facebook, Meebo, Gmail, YouTube, and Firefox, all of which are applications I use on a daily basis.
“I remember when I was really young, maybe 12 years old, reading an article where (Netscape founder) Marc Andreessen said he was part of a generation where 90% of their activity happened on the Web,”
I think what Marc said is very true and the shift towards cloud computing is happening as we speak. In an interview at Fsckin, David Liu talked about how he came up with the idea of the gOS:
“I got interested in Google applications, especially docs and spreadsheets, presentations; and originally, I wanted to create my idea of what a Google OS would look like.. if there were such a mythical OS. As I started looking around at all the Google applications out there, I realized that all of our “computing” could eventually be done in the Google cloud. We just needed an OS that looked really good and pointed people to Google in a really friendly, intelligent way. After seeing this, I got excited because I saw it was also commercially viable for the mainstream end user.”
Sure, you can’t play World of Warcraft, but hey, for the mainstream consumer who uses the computer to access web applications, the gOS looks like a great economical alternative. What do you guys think?
