After years of coy denial, Google has announced the Chrome OS — its first full-on assault on the Windows desktop monopoly.
To blow away the hype of any major technology announcement, the best question is: 'What problem does it fix?'. The Chrome OS, Google says, is aimed at improving usability and security.
A very good choice of battleground: both are chronic pain points for Microsoft. Just look at the state of the anti-malware industry — where antivirus software seems as likely to cripple your computer as shield it — and the unhappy reactions to Vista and Office's usability changes. Consumers and enterprises are desperate for simplicity, safety and long-term reliability.
Then there's the question of applications. Diversity and compatibility here have been Windows's strongest shields against usurpers, but at the expense of manageability, flexibility and ease of use. Of late, too, Windows applications have run out of steam — the cloud and the iPhone both demonstrate different and surprisingly capable approaches. The iPhone App Store has created an enormous market from scratch, again by concentrating on usability and security. Google Apps — out of beta now — are strong. And Linux has an extremely good app-store mechanism built in already, through its unified approach to application download and management. Windows's strength becomes its weakness.
There is some good news for Microsoft. By announcing Chrome OS a year in advance, Google has effectively reset the clock on Linux on the netbook and given Ubuntu and its own Android a bad case of the Osborne Effect. Although netbook Linux has fallen short of early expectations, the momentum was still there; it's damaged now.
That should help Microsoft, but it also highlights the issues. The netbook is the beachhead to the desktop, and the desktop the beachhead to the enterprise: this synergy across work and home, once Microsoft's secret weapon, is another positive that begins to look like a liability.
Whether Microsoft can make use of this year of grace, having so far gracelessly fumbled its Windows strategy on netbooks, is another question. In Gazelle, it has what looks like a curiously similar technology to Chrome OS: both it and Chrome OS are unfinished, but it will be hard for Gazelle to do well out of the existing Windows ecosystem. Chrome OS, on the other hand, will be superbly served by the open-source environment.
It doesn't look good for Microsoft. Redmond has been hopeless in the face of the iPhone, and Bing, a massive marketing campaign with a fairly decent search engine attached, fails the 'What problem does it fix?' test. Yet there is a chance for the company, if it moves fast with determination and ruthlessness towards the market — which it can do — and towards itself, which is harder. On every front where Chrome OS attacks, Windows is Microsoft's weakness. That's the problem which must be fixed.
Chrome OS, whatever it turns out to be, proves Google isn't Microsoft's worst enemy. That honour belongs to Microsoft itself.
Talkback
Nice analysis: but one thing that MS may well draw out of this announcement is that, with the introduction of competition, it's now got a better shield against claims of monopoly and might fare somewhat better in its eternal battles against the EU and other legislators fed up with Redmond's high-handed attitude.
That's one way to look at it. I might prefer to think that from the consumer side, people will start to see that they don't have to tolerate the high-handed attitude and buggy software that Microsoft foists on them.
But I'm afraid your opinion is more likely to turn out to be true than mine...
jw
Hopefully there will be some competition in the netbooks when it comes to OS.
That will also increase competition on other software to be used on these netbooks. In other words; the "chicken and egg" - situation will possibly get somewhat out of its deadlock.
Too early to say though as we have not seen this new OS yet.
Still, we may hope for some competition.
So, apart from the fact that it's from Google - which is sgnificant, what's the big deal. Yet another Linux variant to try and persuade people to move away from MS. I've yet to see a comment on this topic, where ever I see it raised, from anyone other than a geeky Linux enthusiast. Those of us that use Windows in our day to day lives at work and play are happy. We don't need an operating system which we need to be constantly tweaking to make it support basic devices or search around for basic applications to do what we want.
Roll on Windows 7 ! (Oh, and roll on Office 14 as well)
Well, here's the problem with that opinion. You don't have to go digging around for basic device drivers, because all of the current Linux distributions support essentially all common devices, and a heck of a lot of "uncommon" devices as well - significantly more than Vista does, in fact. You are correct to some degree about applications, and that is exactly where I make the decision between Linux and Windows when I am helping friends choose new systems. However, even that is not as true as it once was - with OpenOffice, media players, digital photo management, and of course browsers and mail programs, the vast majority of average users will find everything they need in Linux.
If you are happy with Windows, that's great. But please update your Linux experience before you try to put it down with outdated information. To be honest, I should probably do the same in the other direction - Vista was such an absolute disaster that I have absolutely given up on Windows. Win7 might be a good product, but I will never know, because it will never be loaded on any machine I own.
As for Office 14, or whatever the next version will be called... do you suppose Microsoft will decide to change the default file format to something incompatible with any previous Office version, again? Do you really enjoy paying for software which does that to you, over and over and over again?
jw
My views on current versions of Linux are based on a blog I read last week where the guy wanted to do something (can't remember detail) and was going to use an external storage device that wasn't supported on his debian machine so he was going to load some other Linux and then do what he wanted. Just seems that pretty much anything we ever want to do we can do straight out of the box. Plug things in, download a new application whatever.
New file formats in office don't bug me at all. We move new and old versions of office docs between people in the company seamlessly - just downloaded the compatibility plugin which took 2 mins.