Google has taken aim fairly and squarely at the Netbook market, targeting Microsoft’s dominance of the Personal Computer operating system in the same breath ‘ launching an operating system which uses the Chrome browser brand name ‘ this new OS will target both ARM and Intel chips and may come to dominate Netbooks.
Having got 30 million people using its Chrome browser, it reckons that it is in prime position to drive people from the browser down, and change the architectural connections to hardware.
It makes a lot of sense for operating systems to be refreshed every so often ‘ existing OS’s like Windows cannot drop the baggage that they have grown up with, and whenever a team re-writes it, it has multiple targets to reach. By writing Chrome OS purely as a Netbook OS, Google will almost certainly be able to carry out its promises ‘ rapid start up, switch on and get onto the internet in just a few seconds; a system which is virtually free of viruses, malware and security updates and an OS that continues to perform at the same speed after a few years as the day you bought it, unlike Windows which stores away all sorts of data, which is only useful to Microsoft.
Also Google is pushing the idea that applications written for Chrome OS will be entirely web based ‘ presumably it will put its backing behind one set of web development tools or another at some stage ‘ but right now it makes the point that whatever you are happy developing with, if it works on the web, it will work on Chrome OS, but also the same applications will work on Windows, Mac or Linux as long as they have standard browsers.
In essence Google is putting the Chrome browser on a new windowing system and running it on a Linux kernel optimized for the web. The whole project will be open source, and multiple Netbooks with the OS are already planned for the second half of 2010.
Many people will immediately be sceptical that a full OS can be written and delivered in that time frame, given that Microsoft never seems able to achieve that. But much of the code is already written, it’s more a matter of making informed Open Source choices, and then linking the finished system together.
For Microsoft, which will pooh-pooh the idea, but which we are certain will be unable to derail it, this is what it gets for ‘going after’ Google ‘ CEO Steve Ballmer has been very vocal with his threats to ‘get’ Google, and now Google looks like it is ready with its counter offensive. The moment that Microsoft’s revenue engine slips, Ballmer will be out and a new management team will be ushered into Microsoft to try to secure its existing position in the computing world and shore up its defenses.
Sure, Google versions of all those PC based applications are likely to have Google advertising on them, Gmail, browser, some form of word processor ‘ but Google is not saying you have to use these. It is almost happy to sow the seeds of downfall for Microsoft, whether or not it reaps a big harvest of its own or not ‘ just doing it on faith so that it doesn’t have to be beholding to Microsoft any longer in the operating and browser front.
But this move is as much targeted against Apple as it is against Microsoft. Apple has developed a considerable head of steam in the past few years, dominating portable media players, shifting its PCs onto standardized Intel chips and managing to miniaturize a version of its operating system for handsets and creating the iPhone. Apple has established iTunes Music Store as one of the most reliable and intrinsically simple ways of getting both music and video, and has done the same with its App Store, which mostly gives away (and sells) games and widget class applications.
So will the Android App Store be followed by Chrome OS App Store?
In essence this is the difference between a Netbook and a handset. Android is aimed at Smartbooks and Smart phones, while Chrome OS is needed for something simpler. Most common applications will clearly NOT reside ON Chrome OS they will be on the web. But a number of applications on a smart phone need to be available there and then, whether you have a 3G connection or not. Also the UI on smart phones is of primary importance and Google says that the UI on Chrome OS is going to be really simple (probably a HTML based touch browser experience).
Which is what makes us believe, plus the fact that Google says so, that this Chrome OS will end up on PCs. Ask yourself, how many times on your laptop or desktop do you need access to onboard applications? (we are talking non-enterprise PCs here).
The average home user wants their laptop for Facebook, email ‘ which is increasingly becoming web mail ‘ watching video, listening to their music collections and browsing the web. It is a fairly trivial task to make all of these web based ‘ most of them are already. What percentage of PCs will be available to slide down the ladder from Windows to Chrome OS? 30%? 40%? More? We suspect that habit, along with concerns about security, will slow adoption down, but if the experience is entirely spam and virus free, and offers instant on web query, that’s going to knock a considerable hole in Windows over time, say by 2012 or so. And because it is open source, it will act as a price drag on Windows and especially the Office applications, which have become very expensive in the current generation, and that would knock an even bigger hole in Microsoft’s finances.
What is interesting is to ask is who will make such a device? And of late there have been springing out of the woodwork all sorts of companies that are not only were prepared to make a Netbook, but they were prepared to adapt Android, without any of Google’s help, from being a phone OS to being a Netbooks OS. Those companies, Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean businesses trying to muscle in on the big PC maker’s turf saw Android as their first chance. Now they will merely swap across to the new OS. Additionally more GPS device makers, MP3 manufacturers, consumer electronics builders and phone makers may all shift into the Netbook market.
So will that leave Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo and other top tier PC players loyal to the Windows way forward? Not a chance ‘ they cannot afford to be caught outside of an exploding Netbook device market and they will have to come on board, even if it is half heartedly at first. So far, genuine laptop makers have just started calling their devices Netbooks, and not changing the design very much, but soon that will all change, as real low end Netbooks begin to come into the market.
What about Intel? Surely it will stay loyal to Windows? Again it can’t afford to. It needs to ship Atom chips and cleverly by Google offering to support both ARM and Intel chips (which will include AMD variants) Google has meant that Intel cannot afford NOT to come along for the ride.
The only company that has little to gain form this is Microsoft, and even it will be helping, because people using its MSN and Live services will be that much happier using a Netbook to view them.
And once this becomes a cogent force in internet usage, then things like spreadsheets and databases can still be written as a server side, thin client application, and Chrome OS will benefit and move further and further into the Microsoft heartlands. The only area that Google won’t have touched is the server OS, and there are steps it could take there, such as partnering with IBM on AIX, or Oracle on Sun’s Solaris, to make even this no longer a hurdle.
What is interesting is that although we no longer use the Chrome Browser, we believe that all this is possible because of how fast the software operated, though clearly there are things that Microsoft can do to slow it down. However one of these things can no longer be bundling ‘ Microsoft has been hit by bundling disputes the world over, and has to be very careful going forwards. But the Beta version of Chrome browser was lightning. What stopped us from using it is that it would not load pdfs unless you had tons of memory. That problem may now be fixed, which brings us to Adobe.
Adobe will almost certainly have Adobe Flash Video running on this platform a day after the Beta is announced, if it waits that long. This has the potential to be one of the world’s best video platforms, and Adobe is not going to miss out on that. Microsoft, of course, will have to think twice before putting Silverlight on such a new rival platform.
It is also true that Apple OS runs on Intel hardware, and so if Chrome OS can be retrofitted to existing PCs, and we are pretty sure it will, a huge amount of hardware once considered too slow to run the latest Windows could potentially be revitalized. My Old laptop can be turned into my daughter’s bedroom TV set for example. Perhaps it can go one step further, and Chrome OS could even be loaded onto old Intel based Apple Macs?
So will this affect entertainment industries? Well there is a case to be made (and we’re not quite sure THIS early) that this IS the new entertainment industry. Android was always the target for set top boxes, but perhaps Chrome OS could become the basis of a decent web video conversion box, or an overall IPTV set top box, although we suspect not the latter because there are so many resident applications that need to run on that.
But don’t be too surprised if within a year Google is announcing some carve up of advertising based web video viewing with the major US entertainment industry, on the back of Chrome OS.
It is this difference, as we have said, between the target functions of Android and Chrome OS that shows Google’s willingness to ‘Eat its own children,’ the universal expression for going head to head with its own platforms. Microsoft could have been a very different power if it had learned to write software that did not rely on Windows, but it never has. Google is clearly determined not to make the same mistake.
The war for the bridgehead that will (we believe inevitably) establish Chrome OS as a viable Netbooks, Laptop, eBook reader and PC OS, will be bloody, with no prisoners taken. But you know how when two captains on the playground choose teams, it looks to us like the queue of boys that fancy joining the Google team will be bigger than those happy where they are in the Microsoft camp. Microsoft has ‘Et Tu Brute’d’ too many partners for many people to bemoan any loss of dominance.