|  I’m a big fan of disruptive technologies. It’s fun to try to identify which new technologies will turn out to be disruptive before the disruption happens. It’s the technology geek’s version of picking stocks, or Super Bowl winners.
I’ve gone on the record many times suggesting that Google Chrome, and more recently Chrome OS, are up and coming disruptors. So today, as I read the No Jitter article by Tom Nolle, A New "World Turned Upside-Down?" , I found myself very much in agreement. The post opens with: Google isn't shy about doing novel, controversial, and occasionally even quixotic things, and there’s a chance that its latest venture, Chrome OS, will turn out to be all of these things. Chrome OS may turn out to be a failure, but if that happens it's probably only because it's ahead of its time, and Chrome OS may well change computing forever. Not because of what it is but because of what it represents. As the article explains, the very notion of a personal computer is fading from relevancy. Computing is becoming more social, more shared, and less “personal”—in the “this is my own computing island” sense of personal. Hardware costs and connectivity costs are plummeting, drastically changing the nature of computing devices. Cell phones have become computing platforms, laptops have gotten smaller and lighter, applications are moving toward the clouds. Of course, these fundamental changes have a significant impact on operating system requirements. Connectivity, collaboration, and effective user interfaces are becoming key success factors for computing devices. Operating systems that exceed in these areas will have an advantage. Mr. Nolle’s concluding remarks, to me, sound spot on: Whether Google is trying to drive this, sees it as a kind of primal market force, or simply sees it as a convenient path to greater ad revenue is impossible to say. They are aware of all of this. Because Google was born in the online world—unlike IBM or Microsoft—it's not committed to defend a legacy of personal computer evolution. Since all it takes is one attacker to create a war, Google's awareness of the future is already forcing its competitors to take another look at their own strategies, and that will only accelerate the network-centralization of our world. Sometimes you can get so tied up in evolution that you miss the revolution completely, but not for long. It looks to me like 2010 is going to be a very interesting year. | 
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