Posts tagged Operating Systems

Google has an amazing knack for developing products that solve big problems that I did not even realize that I had – and then becoming indispensible in the process.  Google recently announced, Google Cloud Print is just such an exciting new initiative.

On Mondays I offer comments on some of the most interesting information technology stories that I have found on the web that week.  Please feel free to join in the discussion or suggest other stories.

Today’s comments are associated with a recent, exciting declaration from Google.  The upcoming Google Chrome Operating System, is to be a completely minimalist, web-based, cloud aware platform.  As you will read, this comes with one major headache – Printing!  Give it a read below.

Tech Radar – Google Chrome OS brings printing to the cloud: How Chrome will play with printers

Read more:

“While the emergence of cloud and mobile computing has provided users with access to information and personal documents from virtually any device, today’s printers still require installing drivers which makes printing impossible from most of these new devices," says Jazayeri.

"Developing and maintaining print subsystems for every combination of hardware and operating system- from desktops to netbooks to mobile devices – simply isn’t feasible.

"Since in Google Chrome OS all applications are web apps, we wanted to design a printing experience that would enable web apps to give users the full printing capabilities that native apps have today."

As you all know so well, getting a printer to work is a required step in every computer system setup.  It is never as easy as they say it will be and every year brings some new initiative to make last year’s “zero configuration” solution have even fewer steps. But today, it still remains that every printer needs an operating system needs a printer driver for every printer – even networked printers.  That is where Google Cloud Print comes in.  It is essentially a new standard for new printer manufacturers to follow to make their networked printers accept cloud based print requests.  That is not very revolutionary, but it is a welcome bit of strong arming from our Technology Age Leader – Google.  Their dedication to providing a platform to enable legacy printers to print from the cloud, by their supplying an Internet based print proxy, is really innovative.  The basic idea is that your legacy networked or system based printer would connect not to the print server internal to it or on the machine connected to it, as is done now, but rather to a Google Print Server in the cloud.  This is very revolutionary and could actually permit a one printer, one driver solution.  If anyone could and should do it – Google can and should!

If you have a Smartphone, an iPhone or Blackberry for example, or an iPad, or even just a traveling laptop, you know what a pain it is to try to get a print out from your device at an unusual location.  This could be the solution that we have all been searching for to enable the ability for all of mobile devices to borrow printers, use public resources, and print at remote sites without configuration.  I hope that it works!  Thanks, Google, for taking the lead here!

What do you think about this topic?  Do you agree or disagree with me? Do you have a recommended news story for next week? Please share your ideas below.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 19, 2010  by Scott Coughlin.

[Editor’s Note: To my long time readers: This represents a change to my editorial schedule.  I have decided that going forward, The IT Thought of the Day Website will publish it’s weekly News Commentary articles, like this one, on Monday’s vice Sundays.  Sunday will become the day that I publish my Twitter Archive for the week.  Thank you for reading.]