What If We Redid the 2000 .Com Monopoly Edition for Today's Web?

In the year 2000, as the .com bubble was at its peak, it seemed new tech names were going to rapidly eclipse the old guard. Emails and downloads were new conversation topics, and if you weren’t still on AOL, debates would ensue over which ISP you should choose, or which search engine or portal was the best. Sun was the dot in .com and Linux seemed poised to take over the desktop. Obviously, not everything turned out that way, even if some of the names are still around, and even strong.

The 2000 .Com Monopoly Board

One of the fun collectibles that came out of this time was a .com edition of Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. Instead of properties around Atlantic City streets, you had websites. Community Chest and Chance were replaced with Email and Download cards. And you couldn’t buy property for a few hundred bucks, as everything was in the millions of dollars. Not too soon after the game came out (and of course, I still have it), the .com market was decimated, as the companies of the future weren’t built for the present. Now the game board itself looks like a relic of a short-lived era gone by.

The 2000 List of Companies and Categories

As something of a lark, and thought exercise, let’s consider who would take these 2000 era companies’ spots on the board. I’ll go first with my take on today’s cast of characters.

Dark Purple

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Sportsline.com and FoxSports

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Deadspin and ESPN.com

Commentary: Back in 2000, ESPN, as part of Disney, didn’t have a great approach at owning its web presence. It was part of the Go.com family, one reason it missed the original .com board. Now, ESPN represents sports on all media. Deadspin is an exceptional alternative with sharp commentary that is a must read for serious sports fans. (Apologies to SB Nation)

Light Blue

2000 .com Monopoly edition: GeoCities, Oxygen and iVillage

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Pinterest, SnapChat, and WhatsApp

Commentary: The 2000 edition definitely had a bent toward community. With iVillage and Oxygen, two of the three properties were focused on women. GeoCities didn’t age well and was retired. Pinterest, SnapChat and WhatsApp have become some of the fastest growing communities for pretty much all ages and both genders.

Light Purple

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Shockwave.com, Games.com and E! Online

2014 .com Monopoly edition: TMZ, Buzzfeed and Reddit

Commentary: Shockwave? Really. Let’s move on. For fun entertainment and burning hours of Web surfing, TMZ, Buzzfeed and Reddit can’t be beat. Reddit is a tough one to categorize, as it calls itself the Web’s front page, but it’s knocked off Digg, Slashdot and others for that title.

Orange

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Priceline, Expedia and eBay

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Square, PayPal and Yelp

Commentary: eBay could easily be a repeat in 2000 and 2014. Priceline and Expedia are still doing fine. But Square and PayPal are how the Web does business these days, while Yelp is often the place to go for recommendations on what to buy or where to go.

Red

2000 .com Monopoly edition: The Weather Channel, About.com and CNET

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Dropbox, Instagram and Tumblr

Commentary: About.com looks like a content farm, and while CNET’s still alive and kicking, there’s been nothing to talk about since its CBS acquisition. The Weather Channel? Please. There’s an app for that. And more than just finding content sites, anybody can create and share content globally with apps like Instagram, sites like Tumblr and share it on Dropbox. (Apologies to WordPress, Box and others)

Yellow

2000 .com Monopoly edition: eTrade, Monster.com and Marketwatch

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Wikipedia, LinkedIn and Twitter

Commentary: Monster.com and eTrade were monsters in 2000. I still use eTrade regularly, but they’re not known for their monkey-centric Super Bowl ads any more. Marketwatch is a snooze. Now, people get their financial and business data from each other via LinkedIn, in real time on Twitter, and check its veracity on Wikipedia. (Apologies to Seeking Alpha and StockTwits).

Green

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista and Lycos

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Microsoft, Amazon and Apple

Commentary: In 2000, Search engines took the entire final row of the Monopoly board. But the positions of Alta Vista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves weren’t strong against innovators that got stronger in the next decade. Now, diverse infrastructure plays like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple (for many reasons each) occupy this highly valuable section of the board.

Dark Blue

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Excite@Home and Yahoo!

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Google and Facebook

Commentary: That Yahoo! was the Boardwalk of 2000 is telling. Excite@Home was a $6.7 billion megamerger in 1999, but by 2001 was pretty much in steep decline. Without intending too much bias toward my current employer, Google and Facebook are the 1-2 when it comes to the Web today, from the top destinations to hours spent, tools deployed, etc - and both play a role in discovery for everyone.

Railroads/Stations

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Nokia, MCI Worldcom, Sprint and AT&T

2014 .com Monopoly edition: Verizon, Comcast, Netflix and YouTube

Commentary: Worldcom? Whoops. Nokia? Whoops. Things change, and companies don’t always adapt quickly. The megalopoly of AT&T is now most like Comcast’s ISP/cable monolith, and Verizon (including their FIOS offering) is the big carrier to be dealt with. Fighting the good fight, and using a ton of bandwidth in the process are Netflix and YouTube, which are essential media mediums on every device.

Utilities

2000 .com Monopoly edition: Linux and Sun Microsystems

2014 .com Monopoly edition: WiFi and Cloud

Commentary: We’re still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop, and Sun is now somewhere in Oracle’s beautiful campus. But while you could take a stab at a language or a platform, like Python, Ruby on Rails, or even PHP, generically its best said that the storing of data and access to that data are the true utilities of 2014. Pervasive WiFi (or 3G/4G) and Cloud power every app and every site.

Summary: The Web is dramatically larger, and more global, now than it was less than two decades ago. This admittedly English-first version of the .com Monopoly for 2014 misses out on the international communities like Baidu, AliBaba and others. There’s no place for the Uber and Lyft rivalry, and while Tumblr was included, it’s hard to put Yahoo! on the board, which probably isn’t 100% fair. I wanted to find a spot for Spotify and Hulu, but failed. I’d be ecstatic to see if Parker Brothers was up for another run at the web centric board, and you know I’d buy it.

Disclosures: I work at Google, which is a customer, partner and competitor with many of the names on this board. Putting them on a Monopoly board is not an opening for the company (or any other on the board) being a monopoly joke.

Cloud Powered Near Instant PC, Mobile Upgrades Are the New Reality

Buying a new computer or getting a new phone used to be a huge pain. Even if everything was up and running right away, you had to plan for hours, or even days, of moving all your data from the old device to the new one. And if you didn’t successfully complete the data migration, or had sufficient paranoia, you could end up with old devices cluttering your home - just in case you might need to get that old content. But with so much of our data moving from local disks to the cloud, and new operating systems improving their sync and account setup, the day of hot swapping devices is here.

As you know, for the past few years, our home has been a ChromeOS and Android family. This started well before I joined Google, and as each OS gets smarter, that move looks to have been the right one - especially when it comes to this issue.

Samsung's 2012 Chromebook Got Bumped for the 2014 HP.

Last week, thanks to a sale on Woot.com, I purchased a new HP 14 inch Chromebook for my wife. One evening, as she was using the 2012-era 11 inch Samsung Chromebook, I told her to close her eyes. I took her old laptop and put the new one in her lap, and when she signed in, she didn’t miss a beat. All her bookmarks were there, even down to the tabs she had open in her browser. With one move, and for the same $200 or so I spent two years ago, she got a faster device, double the RAM, and a larger, more vibrant screen, with no headaches around data.

There was no question of whether she had to back up photos, or copy her songs. No dragging and dropping off folders and documents. It just worked, exactly as I had expected it to. And the next morning, when she had to print to our networked printer, she just told the browser to print, and the printer was listening. No printer drivers, and not even a memory of a CD-Rom or DVD. It just worked.

A discussion on Twitter with +Josh Elman and +Edwin Khodabakchian

Meanwhile, on mobile, the story is much the same. Whether it’s due to an accidental drop (which has happened in our home more than once), or a required factory reset thanks to trying new software before it’s ready (that’s also happened), starting over with a new phone or starting the phone over from scratch is no big deal any more either. Signing into my account brings my account information, access to my data, my apps, and my preferences.

In the storage industry, we used to talk about hot swappable units - which would enable upgrades without reboots or interruption of access to data. The dream of upgrading servers, disks, arrays or network equipment without downtime was rarely achieved, but often talked about. On the consumer side, many of us have grown accustomed to the inevitable pains that come with getting new devices or even upgrading those devices from one system version to the next, and it doesn’t have to be this way any more.

Standard Disclosures: I work at Google, the company behind ChromeOS, Android, and great tools that help you sync your content between devices. You can assume I prefer cloud-based data.

The Future of Local Storage Is Practically None At All

Stand Back or Your Hard Drive Is Going to Get It

First they came for our floppy drives. Then, they came for our CDs and our DVD drives. It won't be too long until the concept of a hard drive, or any local storage, beyond that needed for temporary offline use, is itself antiquated. After decades of dramatically increasing PC hard disks, from megabytes to terabytes, saving local data is more likely to put you at risk of loss, relative to remote backup, than it is to keep your data safe, helped along by many trends pushing toward cloud storage and applications.

In April of last year, I talked about how I planned to forego the purchase of physical media, disavowing books, CDs, DVDs and other printed materials, when digital would do, and I haven't looked back - getting to my media from any device that recognized my signed-in identity. Meanwhile, as chronicled, starting in early 2010, when I first got a MacBook Air, and accelerated as I've turned toward ChromeOS as my primary device, I have almost entirely stopped the use of desktop applications. If it can't be reached via web browser, it's probably not worth having.

Goodbye Desktop Applications. Your Time Is Past

May's introduction of the latest Samsung Chromebooks (see my review) left me using my Mac only once per day, for a specific task - synchronizing my FitBit. Until recently, FitBit didn't have a completely cloud-capable service, so each night around midnight, after a full day's neglect, I open the Mac, sync the FitBit in the cradle, confirm the data's gone through, and close the Mac again, until the next day. With the recently announced FitBit One series promising wireless syncing to iOS or Android, I'm just one device away from being done.

For the rest of the day, without exception, I am on my Chromebook, or my Android devices. All my music, emails, photos, documents and other web services can be accessed and managed on the cloud through the browser.

Knocking Down Lagging Apps One By One

The evolution of software and its intersection with platforms is an intriguing one. We Mac users in the 1990s and early 2000s occasionally had to make sacrifices, not having access to apps available only on Windows. Similarly, as iOS and Android increased in market presence, there was the occasional app missing from one platform or the other. But over time, practically all applications, or their equivalents, make their way to the top platforms, and while my move to Android more than two years ago came with some apps missing, all the ones I needed quickly followed me there.

No Seriously, Have You Seen Pixlr on the Web? It's Great.

Now the web itself has proven capable enough for almost any task, and reasons why not to go all Web are dramatically reduced, especially the improved capabilities of documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Google Drive, the release of high quality image editing software like Pixlr, and promises that popular desktop applications like Spotify are set to reach the cloud very soon now, to stream music in addition that which you can purchase from Google Play.

Time to Move on From the Desktop and File Mentality

With solid reasons to not go all Web rapidly eliminated, this evolution also brings up the opportunity to revisit old paradigms we've always taken for granted, as how we use our computers and mobile devices has changed.

Consider, for example, the desktop and files metaphor. Decades ago, we adapted our PCs to be similar to those environments we knew offline. The desktop, folders and files all hearken back to this original model. Even the hyperlinks of today's Web follow similar structures with directories and files owned by top level domains, and today's leading cloud storage vendors, including Dropbox and Google Drive, mimic a traditional desktop environment to bring ease of adoption to users migrating from local storage. But this shouldn't always be the case.

While clean directory structures once were enough for me to almost quit a job over a decade-plus ago, machine-generated links to content are good enough, and it's possible we just need to know how content relates to one another, or what you're searching - for example, email, and tags that generate metadata, providing you with what you need even if you don't know exactly where to look.

All Your Computers Are Mine. Seriously.

The notion of this being "my laptop" or "your PC" doesn't even make sense any more if you think about it. All I need is access to my "stuff", and that stuff is tagged to my identity, be it one that is affiliated with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook or any other provider. While Chromebooks have made it most clear that you can sign out of one account and sign in as another and retain access to all your things, the truth is that so long as you are using a leading provider of identity, you should be able to get to all your files, bookmarks, and media from any device with a modern browser. Go ahead, steal my laptop. I'll just get another one that will do the same things and be up and running in minutes.

Kids These Days... They Don't Need Hard Drives

Consider also that my children should never need to use or know about local storage. At ages 4 and 2, my children will enter elementary school in 1 to 3 years. They have been raised with web-connected TVs, tablets and smartphones, have an expectation of anytime access to data, and shouldn't be trained to store data that is tied to any single device. To them, every device has Netflix. To them, every device can get to Google, and anything they want to see, hear or watch can be found by asking Google for the right image or video, instantly - no buffering allowed.

Just two to three years is enough for us to see how rapidly USB thumb drives went from being the hot tradeshow giveaway to now seeming almost completely useless, with online sharing being the norm. Just two to three years was all I needed as a student attending Berkeley in the late 1990s to move from carting a floppy disk across campus to the computer lab for printing my freshman year, to instead email the document to myself as an attachment my junior year.

Oh. So You Don't Have Pervasive High Speed Wireless?

It's easy to sit in Silicon Valley's ivory tower and say that with pervasive high speed Internet, eliminating any dependency on local storage is a brilliant idea. It's easy to overlook potential power outages, cloud disruptions, dependence on third party services, and spotty web. Nobody likes being out of range for phone calls, let alone all your data, and nobody truly wants to be helpless if their account is compromised. Those are not minor and trivial concerns. But neither is ensuring data compatibility as the data is stored on multiple local machines, and backed up to temporary local storage which may or may not be less reliable than a service provider that serves millions or more.

Years ago, it may have seemed silly to move to web-based email instead of desktop applications, and the same could be said for other apps that have now become default on the web - including calendaring, address books, event planning and more. Digital media for entertainment, once the province of physical media delivered to your home or picked up at a retailer, is now accessible anywhere on any device. So too will be your photos, music, documents, and more. I even moved all my family's photos off spinning disk on an array of Macs from the last 4 years and put them on Drive.

The key to staying prepared for the next evolution of computing is to be willing to take a leap of faith - knowledge that you don't need desktop devices when a laptop will do, knowledge that you don't need to have DVDs in your living room when Netflix or iTunes have all you need, and that what you've been used to and taught over decades just might not be entirely the same any more.

Disclosures: I work for Google and yes, Google makes many services that provide for cloud storage and computing, as well as those nice Chromebooks, one of which I gained for free earlier this year and am using right now to make this post (as well as all the screenshots and images in the post, edited in Pixlr).

Fast, Sleek New Chromebooks Bring OS Worthy Hardware

The new Chromebook and a Chromebox to boot.

At the end of 2010, I got my first exposure to a fully cloud-based operating system, when I was an early recipient of Google's CR-48 pilot program. Those of us getting the early gear were guided to be kind to the admittedly clunky hardware, and instead focus on the operating system, which changed the way we thought about local storage. But in addition to the unique OS, which started and ended with the web browser, the machine was intriguing for its long battery life and pervasive wireless capabilities, including 3G connectivity. The second generation hardware, which I obtained from attending Google IO last summer, started where the first gen left off, syncing quickly from my Google account, and bumping up its speed, while maintaining great battery life and wireless.

But in both cases, the devices were my backup devices, secondary to my primary machine, a MacBook Air. Be it specific software, inertia or simple speed and aesthetics, I still found myself using the Apple laptop the majority of the time - except when I was away from home or the office, as the Chromebook has from day one been best for mobile computing. The newest devices, being introduced today, have flipped that argument on its head. I've been using the new Chromebook for the last few days, and the only time I ever got my Macbook out was to sync my Fitbit tracker with its desktop cradle.

  Google introduces the new Chromebooks

The new Chromebooks are incredibly sleek, light and fast to boot. That may be hard to substantiate, especially if you assume my pro-Google filter is in effect, so I tested on the WebGL fishtank demo, getting 60 fps at 1,000 fish, lowering to the high 40s if I made that its separate window and kept working on something else, be it Gmail, playing a YouTube video, accessing my docs on Google Drive, or browsing the web.

I've been thinking about and working toward a cloud-centric lifestyle for years now, and since joining Google last August, I spend practically all my waking connected hours in Chrome. I have Chrome on my Android phone, on my TVs with the Google TV, on my Mac laptops and, obviously, at the heart of the Chromebook.    The benefits of having access to all my bookmarks, user profiles and content from device to device cannot be overstated, and the newest laptop no longer makes me feel like I am compromising anything in exchange. The hardware is thin, the keyboard and trackpad are top quality, and its weight is light enough that if it were held next to the latest model Macbook Air, any difference is scarcely noticeable. This is no longer just a evolutionary OS story, but one that has hardware worthy of it.

Disclosures (Per Usual): Yes, I work for Google. I have been testing this new unit free of charge. I also previously received the CR-48 and second generation Chromebooks free of charge prior to joining Google, so life is pretty good. :)

In-App Purchases: By Account or Device?

In a world where the Web is increasingly consumed on mobile devices, and applications on iOS, Android or other platforms continue to proliferate, developers are turning to in-app purchases to drive revenue, not just for premium applications, but for free applications that often get you in the door, but entice you to pay up for additional features. But what many developers aren't preparing for is a world where consumers have multiple devices, but carry the same apps - putting the customer's data at risk, tied to a single device, even when a centralized cloud solution seems like a reasonable and much more modern, alternative.

Traditionally, premium software vendors have asked customers to pay on a per-install basis. Want to run Adobe Photoshop on multiple computers? You have to pay a multi-user license. Want to run Microsoft Office for the whole family? Get a family pack. But on the mobile side, thanks in large part to Apple's leadership on the iTunes store, and other app stores, including the Android Market (tied to one's Google account), premium and free applications are synched on a per-user basis. Want to upgrade your iPod or iPhone? A sync with iTunes should get your apps back. Purchase the latest Android tablet or phone? Log into Google with your account, and the Android Market will start feeding you your apps.

That said, synchronization of content between devices is comparatively poor. For every cloud-based app like Gmail or Spotify that recognizes your ID and displays your information on every device, one finds applications that live on your phone or tablet, and don't communicate to any parallel installs you have. (See iTunes' guidance on this issue) This leads to the very common issue known by any Angry Birds addict, who finds themselves conquering the same levels from phone to phone to computer or even on Chrome, instead of starting where they left off. If you love killing pigs and burning time, that's wonderful, but I'd bet many people would find it valuable to log in with their account on any device, and continue where they left off. Some apps, like Barnes and Noble's NOOK app, do this very well, but many miss the target.

The situation becomes even more complicated with the advent of in-app purchases. Forget about the Mighty Eagle (just one dollar per level!) in Angry Birds. You can purchase weapons and tools galore for sports games and strategy games on your smartphone, but many application developers are making the purchase much like they did in the traditional sense - assigned by device, not tied to your Apple account or your Google account. That means that not only do your premium purchases not follow you from device to device, but even worse, if you have to reinstall your mobile OS for whatever reason, you've lost the in-app purchase data, and probably a bunch of the app's history as well.

Living on the bleeding edge of early adopterdom as I do, I've learned to be flexible with the occasional bumps. I got hit with this in-app issue this summer when I had the chance to reinstall Honeycomb on my Android tablet from Samsung, only to lose the in-app purchases I'd made on the 9 Innings baseball game, along with dozens and dozens of games played and players acquired. While I didn't have to rebuy the app itself, which is great, I was starting on Opening Day all over again. That's nuts.

I can understand application developers wanting to ensure they receive appropriate payment for their apps being downloaded and enjoyed. I think the functionality of in-app purchases is a great expansion of mobile commerce. But in a Web-centric mobile world with centralized accounts, storing one's application data on the device, without backup in the cloud, seems short sighted. Many of us carry multiple devices, and may some day upgrade our phones and tablets. It'd make more sense for me that we can do so without fear of losing our progress and our premium buys.

Living In the Browser Is No Myth. It's Possible.

Wrapping up my second full week at Google, I'm still very new here - walking a delicate balance of learning from those already here, while also delivering value on my own. There have been few surprises, given how closely I've worked with the company before joining in an official role, but on a technical level, it's interesting to see how truly cloud-centric the company is. Obviously, being a company who believes strongly that you should never bet against the Internet, and whose many Web services help users migrate away from desktop applications, this makes complete sense. But I honestly live in Chrome, all day.

Back in 2009, I wrote a post on how you can clearly separate your work and personal social media personalities, through smart separation of Web browsers and TweetDeck (now part of Twitter). At the time, I told you how I used Safari for personal activity, primarily due to my bookmarks, which also synched with my iPhone, and how I used Firefox for work stuff. Flash forward two years later, and the story is much the same, but I'm using two separate builds of Chrome to do both, and rarely exiting the Web.

For all google.com activity, I use the standard Chrome Web browser, and securely login to my account and those places on the internal network I should have access. In parallel, I run the Canary build of Chrome for Mac OS X, and maintain my personal account there. This means I don't have to get confused about running multiple accounts simultaneously in a single browser, and still see everything I need to. After all, it'd be a mistake to post content intended for a work audience on a publicly facing destination like Google+, and I want to remove the opportunity for such an error.

Aside from separating the two personalities, work and personal, practically everything I need to do is on the Web. Gmail is my launching point for communication with colleagues, including Google Talk for instant chats. Google Calendar tracks others schedules and my own. Google Docs is where all of us collaborate on projects. Think this is a big company secret I'm leaking? Well, it's not. Google uses its own products, and it makes sense.

Early in 2010, I talked about how I could see living in a cloud-centric world when I got my first MacBook Air, dramatically reducing the hard drive space available from my prior model. When I got the option to choose a laptop upon joining here, I again opted for the device with the smaller disk size, instead of a bigger, bulkier, MacBook Pro or its equivalent, as I knew I wouldn't need the bits.

While living in the cloud may not be for everyone yet, the trend toward Web-based applications, faster broadband and expanding WiFi availability, coupled with ever more capable smartphones, makes the opportunity to live in the browser real for more and more folks. It's come to the point where having Microsoft Office applications and Adobe Photoshop available feels like a crutch, or a stopgap as we migrate into the Web. It's the realization, for the most part, of the vision shared by Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy years ago, where the network is the computer, and your profile is portable. Just prove you're you, and get to your data from anywhere.

The Cloud Makes Using Even Windows Simple

In an odd twist, Google is making it even easier to use Windows than ever before. While that sounds silly, the move to the cloud means that if you bring Chrome with you and you use many of Google services (like Plus, Reader, Blogger, etc), the computer and OS are practically invisible.

So today I'm packing my HP and wearing my Microsoft shirt, but that doesn't mean I don't have to really touch any Microsoft software. Note the bookmarks in the toolbar pretty much get me most of what I need. That's what the cloud is all about.

Using All My Products In the Cloud on Windows

/via my Google+ Profile.

Still Looking to Sync the World of Desktop, Mobile Devices

As an over-extended digital device collector, I have my unfair share of tablets, phones and laptops strewn about my office. My kids are practically tripping over them, each one having its own use or unique operating system. As I use each of these devices, I find myself seeing gaps in the way different applications share data - keeping user information local to the device and locking it away so I lose information when I switch. While the Web and the buzzword-heavy "cloud" are helping matters, we've still got a lot of room to grow.

As I move from device to device, I'm doing so making decisions based on what applications and data I will find when I get there. By using my laptop, I lose access to games and apps that run on my Android phone and tablets. By using my phones, I lose the desktop apps. While some are looking to Apple to lead the way by merging the OS X concept with iOS, less talk has been made of bringing these iOS apps to a touch-screen enabled desktop. Maybe the idea is not happening because it's a bad one, but some smart app developers have thrown caution to the wind and brought their content to practically every screen.

Take the ubiquitous Angry Birds franchise for starters. I can play Angry Birds on my Mac from the app on the Mac App Store. I can play it on Google Chrome on the Chromebook. I can play it on my Android phone and tablets. I can play it on the iPad and iPod Touch. It's everywhere. The downside, of course, is that I have to conquer all the same levels again on every device, with no central record.

A little better is how Barnes and Noble approaches its NOOK eBooks. Purchases I make on my NOOKColor may initiate there, but I can also read the same books from my NOOK app on the Galaxy Tab (7 inch or 10 inch) and there's even a Mac client. I just have to sign in to my account and my library is right there. Very cool. If I'm connected to the Web, it will even know which book I am reading and open to the right page. That's the kind of integration I am really looking for.

You can also see smart integration of user preferences in the way Safari on iOS has the same bookmarks as on your computer, or how Chrome bookmarks follow you from Google Account-enabled machine to machine.

But most of the time apps are not behaving this way. Android's default browser is still not Chrome (and this baffles many), so the integration isn't there. Meanwhile, if I play 9 Innings baseball on my Galaxy Tab 10 and get through 81 games, starting the same app on my Galaxy Tab 7 starts at game 1. Even if I buy in-app enhancements to the game (and others like Home Run Battle 3D), those enhancements are device-specific.

Now that we can have Web-centric user profiles and can back up our user content, history and preferences, the very least we can do is be sure that our activity is matched across similar mobile devices. I recognize that often coding for desktop and mobile can be very different, but as the devices blur between smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, a screen is a screen is a screen, and I want to get the same stuff everywhere.

Defaulting to a Web-centric operating system like ChromeOS is a start, of course, but it's early days for that, and not everything has yet made the trip. I'd love Spotify on my CR-48 the same way it's on my phones and tablets and Mac, but it's a major hole until it hits the Web.

One practically has to make a mental matrix to remember what content and services are available on which devices, and what one loses when they choose one screen over another. I'd like to see more developers thinking about eliminating these gaps and giving users what they want no matter what screen they choose.

Chromebooks Poised for First Look Under the Microscope

Google's browser-centric Chrome OS will be getting its first reviews from those outside of the company's beta program starting this week as units from Samsung and Acer reach the first buyers on OEM hardware. Already, reviews have started flowing in, with the first observations offering a mixed set of feedback, as many struggle to find a way to assess the products - either comparing them to traditional OS-based laptops, or thanks to the pricepoint, against low end netbooks.

Unsurprisingly, the responses are typically positive about the ease of use and access, but eyes are quickly drawn to what's missing, namely, the host of traditional software applications that live beyond the browser today.

Browsing my Mac Mail on Chrome OS With Google Music Playing

When launching a new product into a very crowded space with tons of history, a new challenger needs to determine a few things, including:

• Does the product accomplish something altogether new, never done before?
• Does the product improve upon existing systems in capability or performance?
• Does the product save people money while offering similar capability?

For those curious about ChromeOS or iOS or Android or any new technology, the basic questions revolve around whether the new product will help them achieve more, or avoid problems with what's already in place. In my initial review of the beta CR-48 unit, I said the browser lock-in felt like I "had been placed on house arrest," adding "serious efforts will need to be taken to convince people why putting everything in the cloud, and abandoning (for the most part) applications they know well, will help their lives." This is the age-old conundrum of marketing in general - tell us why it's better, not just that you've introduced something, but why this will help me.

In the ensuing months, I have increasingly been using my ChromeOS notebook (and am writing this post on it now, while streaming tunes on Google Music). The device's built-in 3G connection, thanks to Verizon, and incomparable battery life has made it a must for events and practically any time I leave the house. I've taken to calling it my "car computer", much like the carphones of old, as instead of lugging a heavy laptop bag complete with power cords, I just put the CR-48 under my arm and then place it on the passenger seat. I'm often stopping before or after meetings to use the laptop from the parking lot, or catching up on email before I drive to the next place. It's incredibly convenient. That said, it's still playing the role of the "second computer" for me and will likely for most people until they get more accustomed to cloud-based Web apps, and as those apps increase in number and quality.

Google's team hasn't said ChromeOS is for everyone. For designers bound to Final Cut Pro and PhotoShop, abandoning those apps is a practical impossibility. At Google IO the company instead spoke to the worker bees who primarily use their company laptops for email, Web access and word processing, all of which can be done on ChromeOS with solid quality, even if Google Docs still takes some getting used to for the Microsoft Office whiz. The company's initial marketing forays speak to fast boot up (which is yes, very fast), the elimination of viruses so common on Windows (but don't scare most Mac users), and the future being the Web. As I wrote on Tuesday, the definition of cloud differs between tech companies these days, but Google's approach, where all user data is on the Web, and the hardware is interchangeable, seems the most pure.

My Current Array of Browser Apps Is a Start for ChromeOS

A Web centric world is one that takes some getting used to, but once you've gotten used to having 3G networking everywhere, and battery that goes all day, typical limitations seem substandard. My wife borrowed my CR-48 to take with her to a meeting at church (which has no WiFi) and while on 3G, she was able to download the membership directory and edit a spreadsheet for upcoming meeting schedules. On the CR-48, all we had to do was make a new user for her on my machine, tied to her own Google account, and her activity didn't get in the way of my own.

Initial feedback on the CR-48's flaws, including the much-maligned trackpad and perceived pokiness, have pretty much been eliminated after months of quick driver updates over the air. I now routinely have Google Music running in one browser window, Seesmic or Twitter in another, and in a third, multiple tabs open to my multiple email accounts. Instead of a cluttered interface, however, Chrome OS has adopted to let me quickly rotate screens, either from a dedicated key for "Next Window" or the familiar alt-tab, used more commonly to switch apps in Mac or Windows. And knowing what I know about Samsung's high quality hardware, which is behind my Android tablets, my Android phone and the TVs in our house, I am looking forward to seeing what they do with their first Chromebooks.

With this first volley, you can anticipate media reaction, which will no doubt be eager to claim success or failure of the project, with box counters and trend spotters alike looking for initial sales numbers and market share penetration. My bet is you won't get sales numbers from Google directly, while Samsung, Acer and others will give insight into the results, or Best Buy might report the data from their online store. It's also extremely likely that Google is in this game for the long haul. Chrome is one of the pillars of the company, so if there is anything resembling slowness, they'll listen and iterate fast, as they're known to. Meanwhile, you can look forward to headlines like those from PC World who eagerly said Chromebooks are "doomed to fail". Everybody wants their bets in early, in the chance they might be right.

What I know is that after initially relying on MacBook Air for more than 90 percent of what I do with my laptops, the Chromebook is taking more and more of my time and it's liberating to take it with me to the park or anywhere I need to go and know my data and my Web will be with me. I look forward to apps I've had to leave behind, like Spotify and others, making the leap to the Web and away from the desktop metaphor. I'd bet, just like the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X a decade ago, those laggards will get there. And you just might see people increasingly taking to Chromebooks for low-cost access to the Web.

The Split Definition of Cloud Suits Those Speaking

Like any good Mac user and tech fan, I absorbed yesterday's announcements with Apple with great interest - knowing the OS updates will be hitting my laptop in a few months' time, and the iOS feature bumps will reach our array of iPod Touch and iPads at home - eventually seeing the best of these new features trickle out to non-Apple systems (including our Androids) thanks to the continued leapfrogging we see in this closely followed industry. But where Apple struck was where one would expect them to - in a manner that suited their interests. It's not necessarily always best for the future, but what's best for them. All money-driven companies would love to shape the future to meet their needs.

The most heavily anticipated updates from Steve Jobs and crew yesterday pertained to their introduction of iCloud, the next generation of MobileMe and iTunes. With Google and Amazon having announced music lockers, and streaming services like Spotify, MOG and Rdio in the mix, Apple's big move into the cloud was much-discussed, as news items followed each label, signature by signature, and watched the tea leaves to try and anticipate what Apple would deliver.

Apple used the term iCloud to represent the near-synchronization of digital media between a host of devices, from music to movies, books and photos. Buy once and play anywhere was the idea. No more moving of data back and forth. That's good stuff - and much was made of the $25 a year iTunes Match, which would push all your music, purchased on iTunes or not, to your other devices. Very clean, but oddly misrepresented, I believe. Apple says that iCloud stores your music, and its description page strictly states "your music is stored in iCloud", while the music automatically appears on your registered devices. But it's not streaming, and it's not as if when you are playing your music that you are doing so from their cloud. You're still doing it from your local device.

In contrast, we have seen two major business models from more acceptably-labeled cloud music services. The first, like Google Music, has you upload all your tracks (which can take a while) and then you can play them in a Web browser, any Web browser with your Google credentials, and play any time you like. The music is hosted in the cloud and streamed to you. The second, like Spotify and others, lets you tap into their available tracks, including playlists you've made from that library, and stream it to you.

Apple did not announce either of those approaches yesterday. They kept with their device-centric model which is making them billions of dollars and quite honestly, simplifying the Web and applications for millions of people. As I joked with one ardent Apple fan yesterday, Apple makes other people's inventions beautiful. They do quite a bit of innovation on their own, of course, but they sure do know how to take other people's ideas and make them look fantastic. But they didn't turn their back on their devices, despite talk of making them second-class citizens.

Google's approach on being truly Web-centric, and not tied down to specific devices, supports their business model, of course. They are making money from Web services (and associated advertising) while commoditizing hardware, which we will see with a big kickoff in a few weeks with the launch of the first ChromeBooks. The ChromeBooks, including the CR-48 which I've been using since December, bring you the Web and nothing but the Web. Sign in with your ID and get your content. Sign in with somebody else's ID and get their content. It's a fantastic idea and one that clearly supports their own business strategy. Their cloud interpretation supports what makes sense for them.

The divergence between these two players' strategies was in clear display yesterday. As a Mac user who has multiple Apple devices and a host of iTunes files, having them everywhere is cool. But I did also make the move to put them in the cloud (Google's version) and love the fact I can get to them from anywhere. Having used the CR-48 a ton lately, it's eye-opening to think of how the hardware is practically disposable. Assume you're logged out and it gets stolen. So what? Go buy a new one. For the price of a high-end iPod, you get everything back. No lost data or preferences. Google's interpretation of the cloud, which matches their interests, has some kind of real value to the user, and so does that with Apple.

If I was looking for a big announcement from Apple yesterday to keep me on iTunes instead of Spotify, it didn't come yesterday. I didn't see a major reason to stick with MobileMe/iCloud instead of Gmail and Google Docs either. But I absolutely see real value in their introductions, and anytime you see major companies slugging it out on quality for their users, everybody wins. But don't expect them to tell you what the future holds, unless you know that their projections are directly in line with what they can sell you today.

While Amazon Chokes on Lady Gaga, Spotify Flows

While Amazon is struggling to keep up with demand for their near-free $.99 sale of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" album, frustrating many people, it's interesting to note that Spotify, the on-demand streaming music service based in Sweden, has had the full album, plus an additional set of tracks, available for free to Premium users for some time, and there are no issues in getting to the music, just another great example of why US customers who don't yet have access to the site, are missing out, and why heavy-handed tug of wars with the music labels involving Google, Apple and Amazon are keeping the best tech away from users, thanks to record executives hoping to keep their inflexible business models from being eaten alive.

With today's headlines focused on Amazon's 'exclusive' offer, and the resulting server meltdown, it's worth noting that Spotify users actually gained access to the same set of music back on Wednesday, May 18th. In fact, the album is aged enough in Spotify's eyes to no longer be included in their "Brand New Albums" section, replaced by even fresher tracks.

While access to the service here in the U.S. is still limited to those with explicit access, it continues to the best streaming library in the world, this just being the latest example. Don't love Lady Gaga? You don't have to listen, but at least on Spotify you can.

The Amazon offering provides 14 tracks plus a digital booklet for $.99. Peter Kafka notes Apple's iTunes offers the 22 song special edition for $15.99 and the standard album for $11.99. Spotify subscribers paying $9.99 a month (as I am) get it for an additional $0.

Google Music Move: Days of File Transfers Ahead

Around noon on Wednesday, I fired up my old laptop, downloaded Google's Music Manager, and started the process of uploading my vast, but long-neglected, music collection to the cloud. Assuming the migration is complete, I'll have a Web-based repository for all the music I've purchased, as a companion to all the on-demand music I can find using Spotify - a match I like a lot. More than 30 hours later, thousands and thousands of my songs are on Google Music in beta. Yet, there are thousands more to go - highlighting a process that may be a challenge for users who may consider making a similar transition. And once they are uploaded, it's not clear if there's a way to get them down from the system if I want to move again.

My blogging colleague MG Siegler, he of ParisLemon and TechCrunch, argued yesterday that Google's move to open up a music locker (as Amazon did) without first gaining expensive deals with the music labels, has essentially locked up the market for Apple, who is quite unwilling to lose their leadership position in the market. He argued that the complexity of moving one's library to the cloud, instead of a simpler, faster way of matching your library to a known database and providing you access (as LaLa once did) would be a major stumbling block for the curious consumer. Putting MG's pro-Apple bias aside, there is some truth to that, if a known brand has a simpler solution and an official relationship with approved music downloads, the value to the cloud locker from a competitor is not obvious.

Downloading 1,945 high quality iTunes Plus tracks

As you know, migrating one's library out of iTunes and to a secondary location, be it Google Music or anywhere else, cannot happen for DRM-locked content. To strip one's iTunes library of the DRM, one must first pay Apple upwards of $.30 per track to upgrade to iTunes Plus. For a library like mine with thousands of tracks, this upgrade can (and did) cost hundreds of dollars - a steep pair of handcuffs, considering one doesn't get any new music in the deal. Converting to iTunes Plus doesn't actually upgrade the songs directly, but downloads brand new tracks in their place, and you have the option to delete the old files.

With a goal of completing this process, come Hell or high water, I gave Apple more than $340 yesterday to upgrade 1,945 tracks - at the same time as I had already told Google's Music Manager to upload my non-DRM tracks to the cloud. After about an hour, Apple sent me an email to say my tracks were ready, and I could begin the downloading process. So I set my old Mac aside, and put it to work, downloading the nearly 2,000 tracks at the same time as Google was uploading thousands more. Good thing I have unlimited bandwidth...

Google's Music Manager Has Uploaded 3,000+ Songs So Far

With my iTunes library now fully Plusified, Google Music has full go-ahead to get my music and that's happening. At this pace, it's likely the first pass of my full library will complete mid-day or late tomorrow, about 48 hours after I started. This process would take longer if it were on my primary machine, doing other tasks, or constantly interrupting the move by putting the machine through normal on/off paces.

Assuming the process completes, I am excited to have all my music in the cloud, searchable and playable from any computer where I am logged in. But as one person asked me, what if Google Music goes the way of Google Wave? I don't think it will, of course, but what if I want to take my more than 50 gigabytes of music down from the cloud, back to a desktop, or move from this service to another?

My Top Songs from iTunes Are Making it to Google Music

One admirable passion Google promises is the support of Data Portability. Its Data Portability Project is focused on letting users move data in services and out of services. You can see the conflicts over data ownership flare up especially in the battle with Facebook, who let users pull in Gmail contacts, but didn't let Google do the reverse. So I am a little surprised to see there isn't yet a way to bring data out of Google Music. Yes, it's brand new and early, but there's no talk, unless I missed it, about getting your music downloaded - be it one track or many. You can delete songs from the service. You can edit them and all their metadata, but you can't move them once they're uploaded. This means if you don't fully believe that Google Music will be around forever, you might still want to keep a second copy somewhere.

There is no doubt a considerable back story to the labels' fights with Google, Apple, Amazon and Spotify. I've heard people say there are hundreds of millions of dollars being promised up front and the biggest payer wins. Google said at Google IO that the expectations were prohibitive and they couldn't agree to such arduous terms. If Apple offers a comparable service on the cloud that knows one's iTunes purchasing history, and can eliminate the need to upload and store songs, but get the benefits of cloud, it will have a leg up in usability. I expect in coming months we will hear more from the Google Music team about improving migration and just how we can be sure we can always own our music.