Chrome OS proves Google can hype, but can it win?
Google becomes more like Microsoft every day. It used to be that only Microsoft could pre-announce a product to mass hysteria (and mass exodus of start-ups dabbling in the area), then proceed to under-deliver for the first few iterations of the product and still make billions in the process. With Google Chrome OS, Google has signaled that it, too, can over-commit and under-deliver and still mint billions.
But let's step back and strip away the frenzied media response to Google Chrome OS to determine what, exactly, Google announced: Google announced that it was shipping Ubuntu.
No, Google isn't calling it Ubuntu, but Chrome OS is nothing more than the promise of an Ubuntu fork. Given that we have Ubuntu and plenty of other Ubuntu forks today, what's the big deal?
Heck, for that matter, we also have Jolicloud, another Linux fork that promises to be an "Internet operating system" for Netbooks, just like Chrome OS. (Ubuntu makes largely the same claim.)
The difference, of course, is that you can actually use Jolicloud today (alpha version), unlike Chrome OS, and I'm actually typing this on an Ubuntu-based Netbook. (Incidentally, you've got to think that Jolicloud's investors were kicking themselves last week when Google announced Chrome OS a day after they announced Jolicloud's funding.)
So, Google will ship an Ubuntu fork, but one that presumably will come with its own secret sauce. Why? Well, as CNET's Rafe Needleman generously suggests, because "The stakes are big enough that it's worth the shot for Google."
Maybe. Maybe not.
Let's assume "Maybe." This still leaves Google with the stated intent to tackle a Lilliputian market that only the Linux crowd seems to get excited about, which is why Barron's slaps the idea around:
I think Google misunderstands the nature of netbooks, which simply are small, cheap, lightweight PCs. Early versions ran Linux, and didn't sell. Once the netbook companies loaded them with Windows, sales picked up. On its last earnings call, Microsoft noted that the attach rate for Windows on netbooks had reached 90%. The people have spoken. Netbooks are a misnomer; while people do use them to connect with the Web, they use them for a lot of other things. Customers want netbooks to run standard software, including Office. And I doubt there will ever be a version of Office for Chrome OS.
Of course they won't support Microsoft Office. They're going to support Google Docs! (See "Microsoft moment" above.) Much as I like Google Docs, and much as I like OpenOffice and a range of alternatives to Microsoft Office, the reality is that if you don't support Microsoft Office, you automatically limit the market appeal of your operating system, a lesson Apple learned. Apple's support for Office was the beginning of its rise within enterprise computing.
It's just incredibly hard to overcome the inertia of an incumbent in an established market. Google looks smart when it is changing the rules for computing (giving search away and charging for ads, moving e-mail to the cloud, etc.), but when it competes with Microsoft on its terms...it's likely going to lose. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler gives a hint as to why. (Spoiler: It's the installed base, stupid):
New markets on the Web can emerge and grow really quickly. There's lots of opportunity for something like Facebook to take over in just a few years. But that's not really the case for PCs and desktop software. The installed base is just really, really large, and the growth and upgrade cycle are much much slower than with Web services.
Firefox has been the most successful piece of desktop software to ever challenge Microsoft's offering. We started the effort 10 years ago and finally arrived at a successful product 5 years ago and in the 5 years since we shipped that product, we've managed to gain about 300 million users and a quarter of Web browsing usage.
Apple has been the most successful operating system to challenge Microsoft ever and they've managed in the 8+ years of OS X availability to grab only about 5% of the global OS installed base.
It's just not fast or easy to move a market that's more than a billion large. Anyone that thinks that major change can happen in months, or even a couple of years, doesn't understand this space very well.
Google came out with a new browser (Chrome) some time ago, and still barely scrapes 2 percent market share. (Fake Steve Jobs says this is because "Chrome is [crap]," but I think it has more to do with the difficulty of changing consumer behavior.) Firefox has done better, but even Firefox is an example of just how hard it is to fight an incumbent on its terms, particularly when the incumbent is perceived to be "good enough," as CIO.co.uk editor Martin Veitch notes.
It won't help that Google doesn't look or behave in the way enterprises demand, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan writes.
In sum, Google has a lot to prove, and doesn't have a track record of churning out hits. It has one significant moneymaker, whereas Microsoft has two, one of which Google is now targeting with Chrome OS. It's going to get ugly, but I suspect Google may be the company that ends up with the black eye. As an open-source advocate, I'd like it to be otherwise, but I just can't see enough differentiation in Google's approach to suggest it will be more successful than others before it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
How do you know Chrome OS is a fork of Ubuntu? Did someone tell you that or is this an assumption on your part? You certainly don't have the access to the codebase or the build infrastructure that Google is using so its not like you can verify this yourself. So how did you make the determination that Chrome OS is a fork of Ubuntu? If you want to make the claim, stand up some authoritative information detailing how you know that claim is true.
-jef
Ubuntu team... or Canonical employee specifically? And I take it this was a private conversation and that person is not willing to go on record?
How about in the future you actually state it when you are passing heresay along. At the very least you should be be citing anonymous Ubuntu membership sources explicitly. Shame on you.
-jef
How about we just assume they have their own version until it is actually seen and used?
Or Solaris is fork, or SUSI linux is fork.
All of them have absolutely different ways of support.
The only one simple thing "Google Chrome Applications Store" can eliminate all Linux clones on netbooks.
There's no doubt that Matt is in the tank for Canonical and I'll forgive him his bias as we are all biased when we care about something to any significant extent. But we all have to do our part to hold that bias in check and to be objective. There's absolutely no way that Matt has the access to personally verify that Chrome is rebased from Ubuntu package sources as Matt doesn't have access to the Chrome build system or package sources. Unlike Moblin, where some of the package sources are available and show a clear Fedora pedigree.
He's either stating an opinion as a fact (which is absolutely atrocious behavior to see in the laypress and we should not stand for it) or repeating something he's heard from an inside source either inside Google or Canonical. If he's relying on insider information..the very least he could do was to state that plainly...and even better quote the person by name.
-jef
If you did a better job of actually providing objective information and explicitly separating your own editorial opinion content from insider information instead of mixing everything up together we'd all benefit an increase in the application of journalist standards...your reputation included.
"Google Chrome running within a *new windowing system* on top of a Linux kernel. "
and
"For application developers, the web is the platform."
These two statements mean that much of the software specific to Ubuntu is not going to be used, as much is built around X11, and much of it is built around running software locally.
What remains, after Google strips out many of these modifications, are some low level tools, and the kernel. Heck, it might not even use dpkg. Of course, Ubuntu has put a lot of effort in optimizing the kernel for netbooks, in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but if the web is a platform, its hard to see how taking advantage of these optimizations would be at all relevant when the primary development platform is the browser. The most I can see is Chrome getting Ubuntu's excellent hardware detection and drivers.
So, really, from a practical sense, whether or not Chrome OS is a fork of Ubuntu isn't really relevant to discussion. Matt's emphasis on this as a way to belittle its significance, especially without citing a source, doesn't make much sense, no matter how you look at it.
- How easy is it to use?
- Can I do what I want with it?
The iPhone doesn't support MS Office, but it has given enough developers access that you can get an app to do anything you want with the device. Oh yeah - and it is easy to use.
Google will have a hard time replacing everyone's desktop. It makes sense to start with a netbook. People who have a desktop want a netbook as a second computer. People who don't have a desktop now are not going to have an expectation that it's going to run MS Office cause they don't even know what that is!
Google's competition is Apple, not Microsoft. If the new Apple netbook plugs right into the current app store, they are going to have a big head start.
People were not buying Linux netbooks because they ddin't know if they could use them.
Windows XP is familiar.
People would buy a Google netbook if they thought it was as easy as using Google.com
But Apple can also bridge users minds from the iPhone the iTablet too, so let's see how the cards are played.
A great brand is just the beginning - execution is critical.
Microsoft tried to bring Windows to the PDA and has really struggled - why?
See above - hard to use and limited apps.
"But let's step back and strip away the frenzied media response to Google Chrome OS to determine what, exactly, Google announced: Google announced that it was shipping Ubuntu.
No, Google isn't calling it Ubuntu, but Chrome OS is nothing more than the promise of an Ubuntu fork. Given that we have Ubuntu and plenty of other Ubuntu forks today, what's the big deal?"
in a way that implies its your thesis. You also used the word 'Ubuntu' 8 times. Thats just as much as you mentioned 'Chrome OS'. If this is not the focus of your article, you should not have featured it so heavily.
Google is making huge technological advancements (as far as I can tell so far) and handing them over to the open source community. Google is already a primary financial supporter of the Mozilla Foundation. They also contribute to the growth of the open source community by running Google Summer of Code.
Google is filling an already roughly filled hole by taking taking one small piece of gravel in the whole, making it so it fits the hole better (removing unnecessary bumps and shaping it optimally as a flattened ovoid) and then convincing everybody that it'll take all their larger pieces of gravel out, if they don't make theirs the same way. So in the end, the hole may not be filled with Google's gravel, but it will be filled better because everybody else made their larger pieces of gravel smoother and shaped roughly as flattened ovoids.
Another analogy would be existing OSes being genetically diseased cells, and Chrome OS being a 'cell' containing only a viral agent designed to cure the genetic material in those cells. Even if Chrome OS fails (its cells die because they can't compete), it has a good shot at infecting, and thus curing, the rest of the tissue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8147053.stm
"Monday's accord signed between Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Turkey -- a milestone in the Nabucco pipeline project much delayed by lack of commitment from gas-exporting nations -- is aimed at cutting Russia's gas monopoly in Europe. About a quarter of the gas consumed in Europe is sourced from Russia. "A gas alliance against Moscow has been concluded," the mass-circulation Komsomolskaya Pravda said, terming the deal "a blow" to Russia."
They just announced it..how have they under-delivered when they haven't even begun to deliver anything yet? Sure they _can_ under-deliver, but they haven't given any indication that they will, nor do they have a past history of under-delivering. I don't get that statement at all. A lot of supposition there.
Linux is the kernel, nothing more, it is the heart of the operating system which makes everything work. All else on top of it is GNU Licensed open-source software which makes up the rest of the distribution. This includes the shell interface, which provides the command prompt, X Windows which provides the graphical interface, Gnome which is the desktop environment that runs programs in X Windows, and so on and so forth.
Google Chrome OS is the Linux kernel with Google's own GUI built on top of it. Whether it will be using X.org aka X Windows at all is yet to be see. Its highly likely that Google will use their own technology to build a custom GUI environment for the new OS or they'll build upon the free open source code of X.org and make their own desktop environment. Any Linux distribution development team is free to do this because all of the source code for this software is freely available to anyone who wants it.
There's no evidence that says Google Chrome OS is built from Ubuntu, meaning the source code of the "distribtion" was used to build a new distribution (ie; Mythbuntu, gOS, etc.) instead of developing the distribution completely from scratch. That's done by building the kernel straight from source code and then building the distribution around it from source code and not using any existing code or pre-compiled binaries from other distributions. This is most likely how Google developed the Chrome OS, from scratch rather than piggy backing off an existing distribution.
It hasn't even been released yet so whether they will under-deliver is still a question. And I doubt it if what they did was "over-commit". They promised to deliver an OS that is essentially built on a linux kernel with a new windowing system. With all the smart guys in Google, I bet they can deliver what they said they would in the timeframe they've given.
Although the market hasn't moved to netbooks in any serious way, most people think that the world will eventually end up using small, wireless devices (MIDs) as a primary point of access to the internet. Google is just trying to be one of the first to develop for what may potentially become mass market devices.
Pointing out that people don't use netbooks as netbooks now is kind of stupid. That would be like Apple refusing to create the iPod because no one is currently using an MP3 player.
RT
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- by justinlawrence July 15, 2009 6:01 PM PDT
- We all thought that the search market was saturated, but Google managed to bring something new.
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(32 Comments)I'm looking forward to all the benefits of healthy competition.
I'm hoping that Apple take a chance and release there OS for PCs.
Look, it's a pie... in the sky. :)