Google Chrome OS

[RoyGBiv]

I assume most people who follow these sorts of things have heard about this already, but I thought I'd post a link anyway.

This could get interesting ...

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

...

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

Rumor of this has existed for years, and the emergence of Chrome lent evidence to those rumors.

I'm not at all a fan of web based applications. A better javascript engine has improved the performance of Google's web apps on Firefox, and of course they already functioned better than they had at introduction on Chrome, thus the continuance of the speculation. The new OS will make using such applications even smoother. However, to my mind, the fatal flaw in any web-based system is in the reliance on network connectivity in a world where that connection can be expensive, extremely limited, or non-existent. In theory, it's the current ultimate in portability. In reality, such a system makes one beholden to the "monthly service fees" that many of us who have lived with computers most of our lives have been dreading for years. This hearkens back to the days of having to acquire time at a terminal to be able to use the power of the central computer to which it was connected. No one but those who profited from such a system cried when the personal desktop replaced the behemoth in the basement.

For certain purposes, I see the utility of this, but I am fearing more and more what the future holds.

[canetoad]

1. Me too Roy, me too

How many times have we heard 'Too big to fail'. Google failed, albeit temporarily when MJ died last week. The possibility of entertainment news curtailing ones ability to go about their daily work is one that fills me with dread.

We have all experienced the utter frustration of dealing with ISPs and Telcos when it is impossible to get a straight answer to a query, let alone dependable customer service. Why would anyone put what may be their livelihood in the hands of these monsters.

I also predict a loss of productivity will be the result of dependency on web apps. I rarely use any application 'out of the box', in other words the application default settings. Idiosyncratic though it may be, I tweak options until I have it operating at the optimal level for my style and for the work I do. This makes it easy to resist the constant 'upgrade' circuit and focus on the features I really need and want, rather than those which are fashionable and so-called cutting edge. Definitely a case of The Devil You Know....

A recent example was a flakey net connection at the office. The ISP blames the telephony provider and vice versa. In the meanwhile I cannot send or receive email, hunt for resources, update the website. I flounced out of the office to work at home, where at least the cable connection is reliable - this week! There have been times that I have argued for weeks with my home ISP tech support that there is a provider fault, being forced to go through the low level techs before I can convince them that the fault is on their part.

I'm feeling old; I believe in personal responsibility, including the storage, backup and organisation of ones own data.

[RoyGBiv]

2. I'm feeling old too ...

Your point about productivity is a good one, and I've seen the results of this personally.

One of the many things that happened at Cox my final year there was that we migrated to a new system for interacting with customer accounts. It was web based.

I complained mightily at the time, having some influence, but no one listened to anything I had to say. "The database is located on a central server already. What's the difference?" they asked, rhetorically as it turned out. They knew the difference. They just didn't believe it was a difference that mattered.

I didn't have *that* much influence.

The day we migrated, our productivity rate halved itself, then halved again, which they attributed entirely to the newness of the system, resistance to its use by us "old timers," and just working the kinks out. A year later, with ample time to learn the thing behind us and enough turnover that the "old timers" wouldn't have significantly impacted the equation, our productivity level hadn't come within 25% of what it had been prior to the change. (Productivity in this instance refers primarily to the rate at which we were able to manipulate customer accounts.) The whole damn system was simply slower. It data had to go through a brazillion filters to secure it before it got out into the wild so that the sensitive information was protected, and the system downtime due to network lag on Internet lines outside our own network combined to ensure it would never recover.

To put a real-world example on it, with the old system, I could start a new account from scratch and install and activated a phone line with two numbers and every option we had in about 5 minutes. On the new one, it took me at least 20 on roll-out and only improved to about 10 minutes at my best. The screens to do all this looked nearly the same, and supposedly the mouse-click method should have been quicker (it wasn't). Most of the delay involved all the lag when moving between screens. Imagine the difference between clicking between individual pages on DU and taking a book and flipping through all its pages with your thumb. That was the level of the difference in speed.

But they powers-that-be called it a success because it was cheaper, at least according to one set of budget figures.

Granted they no longer had to provide the depth of training that was needed to use the old system, which was an application installed on everyone's workstation that interacted with a central database via a closed network. That system was complicated and relied on keystrokes rather than mouse clicks. It looked like a DOS app would. (And you could use the mouse, but the keystroke method was much faster once you knew the codes and key combinations.) They no longer had to pay a per-station licensing fee. And, they no longer had to employ a number of people to provide direct technical support and maintain the database.

But, a new budget category was created that funded all the outsourced technical support, the calls to which increased roughly 300% over what was peak with the previous system. We had to employ a new systems security team that dealt only with that system, the members of which demanded far higher salaries than the tech support personnel who had serviced the previous system. Downtime was phenomenal, which I am certain resulted in lost sales. Employees were frustrated and stopped caring as much. It was a minor, but notable point in my decision to leave the company.

The college where I work now uses a web-based application as well for dealing with student records. It goes down regularly, or I should say the Internet connection goes down somewhere between us and the company's servers on a regular basis, sometimes involving our ISP, sometimes something else. (And we don't have the advantage we had at Cox of administering our own network structures.) During registration, this creates an absolute nightmare.

Oh, and both at Cox and where I am now, we have millions of dollars to spend to resolve these little problems and have "preferred" customer access and at least a direct line to our ISP's support structure where I am now.

What happens to the student who is trying to finish a paper at 3am when the network goes down?

[Why Syzygy]

3. In my tech support days ..

if a customer asks to "speak with a supervisor", we HAD to escalate the call to a team leader.
In one of the training sessions they played a tape with a tech who continually refused to transfer a request. That was his last day at work. In my experience, it works in real life. They might ask for a "reason" or try to tell you they can help you; but insistence pays off. I'm proud to say I never had a request for transfer or had to escalate an irate customer.

[canetoad]

4. I may have sounded a bit harsh...sorry

I'm with Optus cable, which is one of only two cable internet providers in Melbourne. The other is our national telco, Telsta (or Hellstra). Because I'm a patient analytical type :) I'll exhaust every possibility before calling for tech service. I must add, that 98% of the time, my cable is good but when a fault occurs it seems to be very difficult to convince anyone that it is their problem, not mine.

The standard procedure is to send a tech guy out to replace (I'm not sure of the spelling, this is what it sounds like) COW, which is apparently a smallish component that sits on the pole out in the street and is susceptible to weather effects. Sometime is is the COW(?)but more often than not it's something else. This means another call, another appointment, another wait.

I always follow through to the bitter end and have been rewarded with free months, new modem etc, but I'd hate it if my life or livelihood utterly depended on having the connection fixed quickly.

[RoyGBiv]

5. It's all a numbers game ...

I've seen both sides of it, and I understand the pressures from both sides. It's a difficult equation to manage.

On the one hand, you have the company.

At my employer, a tech service call cost the company $50 base for every truck roll. The majority of these truck rolls were not required, which naturally service managers saw as wasted spending that was taken out of the same budget used for genuine problem and infrastructure upgrades. They are tasked at the beginning of a fiscal year with completing certain projects, and each wasted truck roll results in a limitation on their ability to do that, i.e. less ability to allocate overtime to get it done quickly all the way up to creating a need to cut costs by reducing personnel, using cheaper, lower quality parts to possibly not meeting a deadline at all.

The biggest problem from the company's end is that the people who call with a problem aren't like you or me at all. Those who report a problem with their service when the actual problem is they forgot to plug in the damn computer are a *majority* of tech service calls. (I'm exaggerating the specifics, but not the type.) The fact was, most Internet problems could be fixed by power cycling the modem. Most cable problems were due to customer-installed wiring, and most phone problems were due to customers not hanging up an extension.

On the other hand, you have the customer.

Most tech support personnel either don't know how to do their jobs effectively or don't care. (And I say that as a person who did this job and supervised others who did it. I can count on one hand after a freak accident that removes half my fingers how many genuinely competent people worked with me.) Many of these companies do skimp on infrastructure, which results in massive problems. They oversell nodes and create congestion of their own making. The place sales quotas on technicians upon which the latter's job depends, motivating them to be less interested in problem resolution than they are at selling new levels of service.

It's enough to make a customer want to scream.

I don't know the answer. I never figured it out while I was there. I just tried to do my job to the best of my ability, which was difficult on the best of days.

[canetoad]

6. You might be able to answer this

I always recycle the modem, renew ipconfig, log the modem light activity, check cables etc before I even ring tech support. My opposite neighbour is with the same cable ISP, and our lines hang off the same pole, so I check with him too.

In 10 years with the ISP, I have never called with a fault at my end, so here is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Do tech support departments keep a record of who calls for what, and who was at fault?

[RoyGBiv]

7. What do you mean by record?

I can't speak for all companies, of course, but, yes, Cox kept a log of who was at-fault. It becomes part of the tech support rep's job performance evaluation. The call center personnel were graded on their ability to evaluate a problem over the phone and were dinged performance points for rolling a truck when it wasn't necessary. Over time, this information is used for improving training programs, customer education, and determining where infrastructure upgrades are needed.

OnEdit: It was also sometimes used in billing. Customers who strung their own wire and created problems with it were billed for the need to replace it.

Needless to say, this was the most frustrating aspect of the job. It is sometimes impossible to get the customer to explain the problem in a way that it can be evaluated properly.

We did not note customer accounts themselves with this information. However, customer accounts were noted upon each call-in, and subsequent support personnel could use this information to aid in determining what kind of customer we had. I would always note an account with a shorthand notation for "technologically proficient" so that subsequent calls could be handled more effectively. This wasn't a requirement, however.

OnEditAgain: I worked with customers face-to-face, which is probably the only way I was able to figure this out. I had a customer who referred to her e-mail client as her "database." She would call and say, "I can't log into my database" when what she meant was she was having trouble with her e-mail. She got fed up one day with the lack of help and came to the retail office, basically screaming her fool head off about what morons we were. After listening to her and figuring out she had no idea what a database was (I asked what kind), I took her to a terminal we had set up for these purposes and had her show me what she did before the problem arose.

It turned out that what she was doing was not saving her password, which prompted a password request each time she checked e-mail, and she would hit the CAPS-LOCK key unnecessarily, not knowing that passwords were case-sensitive.

She'd had four truck rolls before it came to that.

The most disturbing part of this was that the service techs who went to her house never figured it out.

[canetoad]

8. Lol, I thought you were a mindreader

What I meant was, say I ring tech support tomorrow with a cable connectivity problem. Is it databased somewhere that yep, in 10 years every request for service has been a legitimate fault of the ISP?

And like your database woman, can techs look up a list of know loonies and incompetents to get a clue about diagnosis of the fault?

I have enormous patience with adult computer beginners, having taught a number of classes. I can tell you do too. One of my faults is that I cannot understand lack of curiosity about how things work. Ms Database may have heard the term somewhere, hell, her reasoning has a kind of logic to it. But she alone is responsible for educating herself so that she doesn't come off looking like an ignorant jerk.

[RoyGBiv]

9. Well, it worked like this ...

Customer calls in, interacts with support personnel. Personnel enters a "comments" screen and enters required information, which was little more than an indication of whether they'd acquired identification status, i.e. was this person authorized to acquire services for the account. They would go through the call and then note a resolution, e.g. escalated to Tier II, truck roll, etc. The technician then had the option of providing more detail. Extremely difficult customers always had more detail.

If a truck was ordered, this order would then go into another section of the database tying it to the support rep and, at length, the dispatched field tech.

The field tech would arrive and determine the source of the problem and either fix it or report why it was not fixed, the latter involving customer fault issues that the customer refused to pay for. This then resulted in another notation in the database about a result.

If the customer called in again with the same issue, the process would start at the beginning, resulting in multiple entries into a particular field. This was repeated either until resolution or the customer stopped calling.

The only parts of this process that produced a report were the bits tying support personnel to individual issues. Call Center Tech #1 rolls a truck. Field Tech #1 reports customer fault. Call Center tech #2 rolls a truck. Field Tech #2 finds a company-caused problem and fixes it.

In this example, Field Tech #1 has a ding against his performance. Call Center Tech #1 does also due to the likelihood s/he did not code the problem correctly for FT #1. CC #2 and FT #2 have positive marks on their performance sheet.

So, no, there was no systematized way of looking up which customers were crazy and which were not. It was individual and relied on the tech looking at the account at a given moment seeing notes left by a previous tech who had dealt with that person. That said, we had back-door ways of marking accounts so that when a rep pulled them up, we knew we were dealing with a certain kind of customer, but no official reports were generated about this.

[canetoad]

11. Thank you, that's what I suspected

Maybe there is a market for a technician, a creative obsessive and a programmer (job anyone????)to create and implement an intuitive, database system to cut down on tech support time spent by training staff to rank the craziness rating of callers.

I have no formal database training, but they fascinate me. I'm mucking about with Filemaker scripting at the moment, trying to build a database for work that sort of mimics the office filing system, culture and conventions. The fact is that, a database is no more or less logical than the person who created it and whatever constraints that person was employed under.

Should there be more focus on intuition and independent thought when constructing databases?

Should I stub the joint, put the cork back in the bottle and have a little nap?

[RoyGBiv]

13. No, take a deep drag ...

You're on to something here, and that kind of thing is possible within a database structure. It's just not considered important by most people who make the decisions.

This is the reason I made a point of noting accounts with "technically proficient." I personally hate having to go through all the asinine questioning. I put up with it because I know why they are asking, but it would be so much more efficient if they knew when I called in that I do know that the monitor has to be plugged in before it will work.

Technical support as practiced currently is largely a matter of damage control, unfortunately, not damage prevention. The problem lies in upper-management, CEOs whose only goal is producing the kind of numbers that stock holders desire so that they can meet the requirements for their golden parachutes. Relatively little energy is placed in long-term productivity because a lot of that involves cost now with rewards that won't be seen until the next CEO has taken the helm ... and we don't care about that person.

[canetoad]

14. I fear we will live in a climate of permanent financial meltdown

until the prevailing culture turns towards thinking 20 years ahead rather than 1.

I'm amazed that no one yet has recognised and harnessed this potential already. Is it because the old school, long term thinkers have died, demented or dropped out?

I think I understand part of the gist of chaos theory; that once all things become absolutely measurable, prediction becomes absolutely accurate.

Then I see a survey or an assessment/review form and I get 2 minutes and four checkboxes to describe a complex set of thoughts and reactions and I just say TOO FUCKING HARD and go play Thief 2 or something.

Theoretically, a database has infinite fields and rows. How hard is THAT to get your head around !!!111 When human nature can be described using an infinite number of 255 character fields......nerdy, inadequate, little database builders will rule the world.

[RoyGBiv]

17. Here's my theory ...

For most companies, in order to become a CEO, you have to work yourself up through a system of utter bullshit presenting a profile of a person who knows how to make an immediate profit. The "immediate" part is important because you're working for someone who wants that immediate profit or positive balance sheet for either a particular quarter or fiscal year and throws the task to you to get it done. By the time you yourself become the CEO, you have been indoctrinated into this mindset. Lower and mid-level managers all thing of current fiscal problems, not long term. By the time you're into a position where you should be thinking long-term, you forget how.

By the time you're the Big Boss (and never mind that most people never get there ... the people who make the decisions all want to get there and work toward it) you're, at best, in your late 50s. You want to retire soon. You have a contract that sets you for life if, and only if, you meet a certain set of numbers for the stockholders. You gear the entire company's organization toward making those numbers. What happens after means nothing to you. You have your money are are retired and/or have moved on to your next conquest.

People do not think long-term. It interferes with personal goals. When you're in the position of actually making a decision that affects the company's future, you're looking at just a few years before you personally want to go off and try to enjoy what's left of your life after having subsumed most of it to reaching this point. Perhaps you've lately realized you fucked up and that all that time you spent away from family was wasted. You've become a humanitarian even. That only makes it worse. You want out as soon as you can, but you're accustomed to a level of living and want to maintain it. You do what you have to do, not thinking for one moment about those whose livelihood relies on your decisions, and you go with that.

I think this is a summary of the world's problems entirely in a nutshell. Perhaps that's arrogant, but it's what I'm left with after having dealt with these games for several decades now and never having had any desire to be that Big Boss.

[canetoad]

19. I can't remember the exact point

when I became cynical about human nature. I read Frank Hardy's 'Power Without Glory' when I was about 16. I was fascinated by the saga of police, political and financial corruption and how petty thugs and the shallow rise to power, even within the supposedly socialist Labor party.

It's not arrogant at all to believe that short term though has doomed the human race. I look at the 'terrorists', the badly behaved Rosie and Nelson, two truly anarchic little beings whose undisciplined yet cheerful destruction has cost me much but provided much more in entertainment.

I am their God.

Not their owner, not their boss. That power abso-fukken-lutely overwhelms me. I'll raise you arrogant and say I've found the meaning of life: Co-operation not competition.

[RoyGBiv]

16. delete

wrong place

[RoyGBiv]

10. Reponse #2

I think I'm reminiscing here. :) This is all causing memories to come to the surface I haven't entertained in awhile.

As an example of one of the "back door" methods of noting accounts, the first screen that popped up when we pulled a customer account was the demographics screen, i.e. name, address, etc. There was a field here we didn't officially use for anything that allowed up to 255 characters of text. This was often used to provide warnings to future support reps.

We had to be careful what we put in the official "comments" section because that information was occasionally subpoenaed and used in court, particularly in cases involving phone service, which is heavily regulated. We were warned against placing personal value judgments in those comments. We could put bland, factual information, but anything that could in any way be construed as personal opinion (crazy, irate, etc.) could not be mentioned, even if it were true by most objective standards. The best we could do was note whether the customer began using profanity or delivered a direct threat.

That abandoned field on the demographics screen was not used for this purpose and often had far more revealing commentary.

I pulled up an account one day and saw something like this: "KKK member. DO NOT send non-white tech. Will threaten with lynching."

IOW, this guy is a flaming racist bastard. I noticed he had a lot of problems that were never resolved.

[canetoad]

12. LOL you have just diagnosed the fall of the matrix

When people can restrain themselves to 255 words, yet convey an unambiguous statement. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, Twitter has its place.

[RoyGBiv]

15. Heh ... try 80 characters

Each line in the CC screen was 80 characters wide. We were encouraged, in order to keep the database small, to put everything we could about our experience with a customer within those 80 characters.

My mom was a secretary. She taught me "official" shorthand when I was a kid because I was interested. Just learning the logic of it served me well in that job.

NSFT-Y HSI/DWN WIN/RC-/PNG+ 0% TRKRL

This means:

I have determine the customer is authorized to access account information. (Actually, I don't remember precisely the letters used here, which is frustrating. I have a memory for this sort of thing. I think that is close. It was four letters followed either by a "Y" for yes or a "N" for no.) The customer is reporting a network outage with their high-speed internet service. They have a Windows-based computer. The customer has power-cycled their modem and reported no improvement. I have pinged the modem and received positive feedback with zero dropped packets. I have ordered a truck to the service residence to determine the problem.

[canetoad]

18. And full circle, back to online apps

bear with me. I'll get there in the end!

With your clues, I can see the logic in your 'shorthand'. It's not intuitive to me, but I could learn it, be comfortable using it.

Different tangent: a while back I investigated online project management tools. It's a huge area, offering international access, telepresence (nyuk nyuk), you name it, this was the only WAY TO GO for holding project teams together. So I did a trial subscription to a couple and tried them out.

It had all the computing subtlety of Outlook Express on growth hormones. In reality they were online databases, designed by desperate little try-hards. Trying to predict and allow for every possible vagary in every possible project, be it tower construction to power point replacement.

Databases used storage and bandwidth which cost money. Online storage/application providers are not charities.....

...people are greedy, maintenance and service will be subject to unrealistic financial demands, commerce will grind to a halt, all for a prevailing culture of I WANT IT NOW.

**Check your PMs

[canetoad]

20. Well, that was two hours

of the most glorious, undisciplined, drug-induced, brain-fucked loss of control.

Keith Richards is my hero.

That Wikipedia! They cover everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_(drugs)