Google Chrome OS and the Tarte Tatin
The Tarte Tatin is an upside apple cake. It used to be my favorite dessert when I lived in France. Yum.
Eating a Tarte Tatin on a lovely summer afternoon while catching up on Google Chrome OS (yeah, I’ve fallen way behind due to my ever demanding day job plus a pile of papers to review out of conference TPC duties).
Google Chrome OS (and other browser OS wannabes) makes me think of an upside cake, just like the Tarte Tatin. Let me explain. In the mid 90s, the Web browser rocketed into the scene. It became the pinnacle of our stack. Fast forward 15 years. With the Google Native Client, one can load and launch native x86 code in the browser without giving up on security (what could possibly be worse than PHP anyway…). Application management is quickly moving to the Cloud (SaaS, PaaS, the-whole-Enchillada-as-a-Service). Likewise, resource management has to play out in the Cloud. Thus, the new-wave browser must underpin both application management and resource management. The browser has become a shim layer buried deep near the bottom of the stack. Voila the upside down cake.
Have we seen other examples of upside down cakes in technology? For sure. Take the Internet. In the 70s, the revolutionary packet networking movement started off as a geeky use case that piggybacked on the very circuit switched network laid out for telephony. This set-up worked well for a long time, until data traffic outweighed voice traffic, in sheer volumes as well as business pull-through. The packet network then moved to the bottom of the pile, with telephony running as an application (VoIP) atop of it, along many others. Voila another upside down cake.
Legend has it that the Tarte Tatin was the lucky byproduct of a bad day in the kitchen. Unlike the Tarte Tatin, there’s little serendipity in what’s happening to the browser and what has happened to the Internet long before. Rather, they are huge R&D undertakings. In my career, I want to see some more of these upside down cakes! Along with chilled passito wine, please, for which I don’t have a geeky metaphor just yet.