Google just made a major ChromeOS misstep

Did you ever watch the early 2000s TV series Scrubs?

The show revolved around a young doctor named JD who always meant well but often got lost in his own head and ended up making ill-advised decisions. In one episode, he started seeing a fantastical opera singer who’d show up over his shoulder and sing an emphatic “MISTAAAAAKE!!!” every time he did something dumb.

This week, as I’m chewing over a colossal incoming ChromeOS pivot and the confounding logic behind it, I can’t help but hear that same operatic refrain sounding in my head — over the shoulder of Google itself, who like JD, generally seems to mean well but frequently gets in its own way.

Join me in a quick preemptive sigh, and let me explain.

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The Google-scented command center at ChromeOS’s core

First, we need just a teensy bit of super-specific context to set the stage here.

Since its start, y’see, Google’s ChromeOS platform has been deliberately different from the standard desktop computing setup.

We could spend days discussing the many ways Chromebooks aren’t like most computers. But if you’re here and reading this column, you’re probably well aware of all that stuff. (If you aren’t, here’s a primer you can catch up with on your own.)

For the purposes of the pivot we’re probing today, the part of the ChromeOS experience that’s relevant is the button that’s lived in place of the standard Caps Lock keyboard key since the very first Chromebook computer — even before it was called a Chromebook — and that’s the Search button, also known as the Launcher or Everything key.

From the get-go, Google wanted to emphasize that Chromebooks were all about making it easy to find what you needed (y’know, as Google has traditionally been known to do), and it wanted to drive home the point that these funky new computers were all about cutting away the fat and eliminating the long-accepted elements of computing that no one actually still wanted in our modern-day world.

So, away went the Caps Lock key and in its place grew that simple-seeming Search button. Initially, that button pulled up a pretty basic web-based search prompt, but over time, it expanded to become an all-in-one app-launching, answer-finding mecca — kind of like an even more capable and effective version of what Microsoft’s Windows-key-connected Start menu strives to be.

As a result, the Search key became at least occasionally known as the Launcher key at some point along the way. And then, in 2020, Google made its boldest move yet: It brought Google Assistant into that same arena and rebranded the Search/Launcher key as the Everything Button — a single streamlined spot for finding or doing practically anything.

As I put it at the time:

With its new powers coming into play, that button … could almost be described as a “Google Button.” Tap it, and in the one box that comes up, you can:

• Search the web
• Search your local computer storage
• Search your Drive file storage
• Search for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in your web-based Docs, Sheets, and Slides collections
• Search for a system-level setting that you want to modify
• Search for an app to run on your own device — no matter what type of app it is — or search for a new app to install from the Google Play Store
• Perform any imaginable action via the Google Assistant

And, critically:

[The addition of Assistant] makes the idea of this “Everything Button” — the “Google Button” — feel powerful and complete. Quite honestly, it’s something you resent not having when you work on ChromeOS and then go back to a more traditional operating system environment. …

ChromeOS is on the brink of becoming the place where Google’s best capabilities come together to form a whole new kind of connected experience. It’s an exciting new start for intelligent desktop computing — and beyond that, it shows us the type of thoroughly connected Google experience Android could, should, and hopefully one day will also provide.

That brings us to today and the head-scratching move Google just made — one that seems poised to bring an outsized shake-up to ChromeOS’s core and the very notion of what the platform represents.

ChromeOS and the end of the Everything era

So here it is: Google’s pulling that long-standing, distinctive Search/Launcher/Everything key from the most prominent spot on the Chromebook’s keyboard and putting a new “Quick Insert” key into its place.

In the same Caps-Lock-associated stall will now reside a function that feels mostly like an excuse to cram more Gemini-branded generative-AI gobbledygook into everyone’s faces and try to convince us that it’s, like, totally The Future™ and something we should be leaning on every hour of every day.

To its credit, Google at least isn’t turning the button into a full-fledged Gemini button. Instead, it’s making it a multifaceted source for inserting different types of content into text fields throughout the ChromeOS environment. That means you can use it to call up emojis, GIFs, files, and photos — and, of course, to summon Gemini’s Help Me Write system for generating text of questionable quality and soon also Gemini’s AI image generating system, too. But it seems pretty clear that those last two factors are the driving cause for this genesis.

The once-prominent Everything Button, meanwhile, is being demoted down to a smaller “G”-branded key off to the side of the spacebar — a shift that’ll start with the newly announced Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus and then seemingly show up on other new ChromeOS devices from there.

As my Windows-Intelligence-writing colleague Chris Hoffman put it, this feels like the equivalent of Microsoft replacing the Windows key with a button dedicated to its Copilot AI assistant. Suffice it to say, that’d be a move most Windows-preferring persons wouldn’t exactly celebrate.

For ChromeOS, the comparison might be even more extreme — because that Everything Button really was both a representation of the platform’s very philosophy and a hugely important practical advantage only Google-centric software could provide. And while the function itself isn’t going away entirely, moving it out of that prime position seems like a silly and shortsighted move that’s bound to backfire.

On the most surface level, people who use Chromebooks are gonna be pretty miffed when their next device has a different button in the place they’ve been trained for years to tap for — well, everything. That’s a lot of muscle memory to ask folks to change, especially for the purpose of swapping in a function they likely don’t want or need in such a prominent position. (Again, imagine if Microsoft did this with the Start button.) 

But perhaps more troubling yet, on a philosophical level, this speaks volumes about Google’s changing priorities for the ChromeOS experience — along with the experience around most of its products and services.

And, on that level, maybe this move shouldn’t seem like such a surprise.

For months now, Google — like most of the tech industry — has been remaking itself in the name of generative AI. It’s been working to push underwhelming and overhyped generative AI flapdoodle in everyone’s faces at every possible opportunity, despite the fact that most of that stuff just isn’t all that useful or reliable for most purposes. That’s very much the case with the company’s recent Chromebook-centric AI additions; much like the generative AI elements on the latest Pixel 9 phones, the devices are good in spite of those additions, not because of them.

And while Google itself hasn’t shared specific stats around Gemini’s adoption or its continued level of use by folks who try it, more and more signs suggest regular ol’ individual users and businesses alike are growing increasingly skeptical of the value this type of technology has to offer.

And yet — well, the gauntlet’s clearly been thrown down here. Google, like so many other tech companies, has gone all in on this stuff as the key to its future. And it’s determined to make us start using it and start seeing the value of things like “creative brainstorming” with its fact-challenged AI bot, information retrieving from a type of technology that can’t tell fact from fiction, and other such tasks most of us don’t see as being part of our daily workflow. It’s determined to make Chromebooks the devices for using all that Google AI glitz instead of the devices for getting actual work — the types of real-world, productivity-oriented work most of us are doing — done effectively.

There’s a reason I’ve said Gemini feels like the new Google+. And this move, especially, really exemplifies that sentiment.

Now, let’s level with each other: If this new “Quick Insert” key had come into existence alongside the spacebar — taking the spot of the dedicated (and already redundant, plus seemingly soon-to-be irrelevant) Assistant key on certain devices — it wouldn’t have seemed like such a facepalm-inducing problem, even if it might have been a mildly irksome addition.

But having it take over that prime placement — one so closely associated with ChromeOS’s identity and arguably its most important function — while having that Everything Button bump down to a much less prominent spot? That, in particular, is what makes this feel like such an ill-advised decision. It makes it feel like something people who actually use Chromebooks are gonna resent and find incredibly annoying. And it makes it feel like something Google itself might ultimately end up backtracking on another few years down the road.

More than anything, it makes it feel like something that should cause a fantastical opera singer to show up over Google’s shoulder and sing an emphatic “MISTAAAAAAAAAAKE!”

For now, though, all we can do is sigh — and hang onto the Chromebooks we already own, without this change in place, for as long as they stay supported.

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