Why Chrome OS doesn't matter--or does it?
I had planned to leave the Google Chrome OS discussion to others. It's not that I don't have strong opinions about it but with a commentariat noise level approaching the Michael Jackson ruckus of Tuesday, I figured I'd try to wrap up a client project instead. I did so and I've been getting questions all day, so I thought it would be useful to put down my thoughts in a systematic way rather than answering every query ad hoc.
Let me start out by making what is probably a controversial statement. I don't see this as a big deal. Microsoft is not now radioactive. The Force has not been disrupted. The computer industry does not look different than it did yesterday.
Look. Just about everyone has been assuming that Google was going to bring the Google Android operating system that it developed primarily for smartphones to low-end notebooks. While Chrome OS is different from Android, it's conceptually pretty much the same thing--an open-source operating system built atop a Linux kernel.
So now Google has pre-announced that it's going to do basically what everyone figured it was going to do. Sorry, but that doesn't make me want to run through the streets shouting and hollering.
This is, in many respects, just another Linux distribution. And Linux has (speaking charitably) not had the impact on the general-purpose PC market that its supporters once hoped it would. Sure, enthusiasts load Linux onto PCs and it can work quite well, but even at an open-source developer conference you'll often see far more Macs than PCs running Linux. I can't say that I understand why Chrome OS would succeed where Ubuntu has, if not failed, largely played to a niche.
It's Google we're talking about here to be sure. To which I say that Google has had plenty of failures: Orkut, Google Video, Knol, and Google Base anyone?
Fundamentally, I'm skeptical that anyone is in a position to seriously displace Microsoft and Apple from effective ownership of the general-purpose desktop and notebook space. There's so much ecosystem, most of all software ecosystem, in place that a new entrant would have to offer just overwhelming advantage. Which Linux didn't and doesn't.
There's a story here but it's not about displacing Microsoft.
Rather, I see Chrome OS as reflecting a change in the client and the way we access applications. To the degree that Chrome OS further illuminates and, by doing so, accelerates such change it may indeed be important in its own right. However, this is largely a change that's happening with or without Google--and certainly with or without anything Google does with respect to client operating systems.
And it's this macro-trend that's the real threat to Microsoft, not Chrome OS. Microsoft's franchise is built in no small part on having become the de facto standard API for programs running on another de facto standard that we colloquially call the PC. That franchise may be hard to crack (although Apple has had a degree of success) but that franchise doesn't necessarily carry over to new areas where far less software is locally installed and therefore a "standard API" becomes much less important.
The Linux desktop (whether Chrome OS, Ubuntu, or whatever) won't be your father's PC and it may not even look like a PC at all. That's the far bigger threat to Microsoft. Not that it won't be able to defend its existing franchise but that it will be cut off from extending that franchise into computing that happens over the Net rather than locally.
Gordon Haff is a principal IT adviser at Illuminata and has more than 20 years of IT industry experience. He writes about what's happening with enterprise servers and data centers, "Yotta-scale" computing, and related software and device trends as part of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. 
Someone at google could blog about a web-based turd, and everyone would start raving about how the world will never crap the same way again. It's actually pretty funny.
The thing that I don't understand about the move to "cloud-based services" is that it seems at odds with Moore's Law. Specifically, devices are going to have more & more processing power, disk space & memory - why would you want to offload processing to the cloud? Doesn't make any sense to me. Seems like microsoft's "Software + services" thing is actually the right way to think about this - some things are done on the cloud, some things are done on the client.
Now the big question is whether or not the things done on the client are written to target a host OS (eg, windows or mac), or written to target a browser (eg, flash or ff or IE). Unfortunately, I think you're going to have to see some advances in the languages/SDKs/runtimes that browsers support to successfully write large-scale, efficient apps running inside the browser.
ZOOOOOOOOMMMMMMGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They'll totally open-source it as well. I'd rather use an open-source Google turd than get locked in with some proprietry crapping solution.
Brought back memories of this old gem: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29225
The internet is BEYOND ready for a contender for Windows vS Mac and LINUX has NOT been able to breech the gap to the everyday user.
I remember people complaining about GMAIL at first.
And P.S Google Video was not a failure, They just bought the Jordan of video sites.
- by Vrmithrax July 13, 2009 8:40 AM PDT
- Yep, it's based on Linux. Linux hasn't made much of a dent in the market, and is actually slipping daily. Maybe having Google behind it will help thrust it more into the mainstream. And the concept is a pretty decent one - since most people are living in their browser these days, why not make the browser the OS, and give it tools to handle stuff outside the web, rather than vice-versa? You can streamline, optimize, and make a low overhead OS that flies on the skimpiest of hardware. WillyWiggler wondered what the point of the cloud-based computing was, well imagine if you don't NEED cutting edge hardware throwing most of your battery life away as heat, and could instead do everything you need on a more efficient and lower powered platform? The netbook is supposed to be a smaller leaner variety of computing experience (there is a REASON that "net" is in the name), so why not have an OS that is tailor made for the new concept, rather than throwing the old bloated standby platforms at it and taxing the hardware more than it needs to be?
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(16 Comments)Oh, and yes Google has had some failures - everyone has, MS is the current king of blunders with Vista. But considering how everyone likens and draws parallels between Chrome OS and Android, maybe people should look back at the history there... Many industry leaders discounted Android as a waste and failure when it was announced, and now it's widely considered to be in the "top 3" of smartphone OS platforms. Funny how, once it actually came out and people could use it, the attitudes changed. And the iPhone, everyone said it was just gonna be a "must have gadget" for Apple freaks, and it's taken over the industry... Glare into your crystal balls all you want, but it's hard to know what will happen until it happens. Anything until then is just speculation and conjecture. Mostly amazingly negative conjecture, but I guess the world has mostly a "half-empty" attitude these days.