Today, Google has announced its own operating system (Chrome OS) targeting netbooks. Links can be found: here, there, and everywhere.
Open source, presumably free, this has the potential to be an extremely disruptive development. Strategically, I think this rollout has been done masterfully. They’ve had time to work on their office replacement products under a ‘beta’ banner for years without having to face direct head to head comparisons. By the time this OS would be ready, those products would be fully up to speed. Indeed, “Google also announced it was removing the “beta” label from such applications as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Video For Business, and others.”
Why an OS? Why free? It reminds me of when a group of friends and I used to camp in the desert outside Vegas when rock climbing. We used to run into town on ‘rest days’ to Circus Circus for 99 cent Margaritas. Where I come from, a 99 cent Margarita is a watered down mess with a only a hint of lime and even less Tequila, but the ones in the casino were most excellent. It’s obvious after a moment of thought that the money is not made back on the drink, it’s made back from the gambling on games like โปรโมชั่นยูฟ่าเบท after a few of these tasty beverages. Presumably in this case the money is not made from the OS, but from the improvements to search provided by getting access to more information, and greater ad revenue.
The tech landscape is littered with product initiatives launched naively into markets the parent company didn’t understand. It will be interesting to see if Google can achieve some relevance on the desktop once the product launches.
My Acer Aspire One with XP would love to test drive a Chrome OS but I don’t want to be on the cutting edge of this one. While I did send away for an official re-install disk, I don’t have a drive to install it. Can be done by other means, true enough, but I figure if install/hardware/drivers/etc craps, I’d be so upset that any rational thought would be blocked by anxiety and angst. 🙂
I’m more curious about using a netbook to play Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis from Steam. Own the cd (a talkie?!) but what must be dreadful virtual memory requirements & subsequent headaches kept me from installing. Read anything about how (if?) games other than online/flash might play using Chrome?
By the sounds of it, your next Acer Aspire Two might have the option to come with this OS installed. Right now, it looks like the intent is strictly for getting started with their office replacements and necessary elements like DirectX would definitely NOT be available for native game development. However, for those users of OnLive 🙂 Suddenly you have a very interesting platform.
I myself am not in favour of keeping documents in the cloud, both for privacy reasons and because the daily afternoon thunderstorms and power outages render it useless. But I’d certainly keep a Linux partition around to be able to boot it up.
I’m with you on the cloud, Helmut. Privacy and the inability to… I dunno, maybe I’m old fashioned. It freaks me out that my docs wouldn’t be on a drive that I can touch and hold and maybe smash. I have a DropBox account like everyone else, but to put all my precious data on the cloud? Hackers could easily discover how pointless and empty my life is!
I love operating systems, just on general principle, so you can be sure that ChromeOS will be finding space on a virtual machine near me. It’ll be interesting to see how this bad boy works out… a browser-based operating system. Who’d have ever thunk?