Congratulations Google! You have just invented the Sun Ray (which Sun invented more than 10 years ago, by the way...).
At last, the phrase first pronounced by John Gage, "The Network is the Computer" has become more a reality, which is not surprising, being so many ex-sunnies working for Google.
Oh, you can learn more about Chromebook in Google's official page, of course.
About Sun, there was even a laptop like version of the Sun Ray, very much like the Google's Chromebook. Probably there are other brands that OEMized the hardware, but the one I know most is Tadpole (I guess they are still doing it with Oracle).
Probably the Sun idea was more interesting as using a Sun Ray installation you can choose which operating system you want to use (Solaris, any Linux Flavour, even Windows). Indeed, Chromebook is just a subset of the original Sun idea, as with a Sun Ray you could also connect via Wi-Fi, ADSL and although I cannot confirm about 3G, it is probable that a version with that connectivity is around.
Which is interesting is the ability of Chromebook to perform some tasks without being connected to the network, which suggests some kind of internal memory storage (flash maybe, a small HDD?), something that the Sun Ray doesn't have.
Well, this is another sample of a cool technology invented by Sun, but whose profits are taken by others at last. Yes, when Sun came with the Sun Ray we didn't have wi-fi so widespread as today and 3G mobile was science fiction yet. So Sun aimed the product to the enterprise customers. The problem was a lack of vision and of an adequate marketing strategy to make a move like the one that Google has just made. Instead of the "1 dollar per cpu per hour" coined by Sun as the beginning of the cloud computing (the Sun grid), this would have probably been a more interesting move.
Well, unfortunately Sun is dead, by not doing such things. The question is if Oracle will be able to monetize all such investment or will be others, like Google, who will take advantage of a more mature market to exploit those "iPod moments" of inspiration.
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