Google has announced that they will be producing their own operating system, which will be geared towards a web-conscious world. So... who's excited?
Google dropped this bombshell a a few days ago, and people have had a few days to talk about it. First, in what is probably in the running for shortest serious FAQs of all time, Google announced/reiterated that the project was free, well supported, and soon to be open source. So that's good. Although not a listed sponsor, it has also come out that Intel has known about ChromeOS and has long been involved with the planning, furthering its mainstream credibility. And there is speculation that the timing of the announcement was a suckerpunch designed to derail the momentum of a Microsoft announcement about their advances into cloud computing tomorrow - a sort of preemptive strike on Microsoft's OS-world before Microsoft can strike into Google's web-world.
So there is a lot of buzz about Chrome OS, and rightly so - it's exciting to think about a Google powered alternative to Microsoft or other open source OSs. But wait - we've seen this all before. Just subtract that exhilarating OS suffix and remember that Chrome the browser was the exact same sort of challenge to Internet Explorer and Firefox. And although it has been steadily rising, even the intenet-savvy community over at w3schools uses Chrome only 6% of the time. There was a lot of buzz about that too, and yet adoption has been far from widespread.
The Chrome OS will start off on netbooks in 2010, and should be fast and very web-centric. But will it do better than all those fateful (ie: returned within 30 days) Linux builds, which were swiftly exchanged for netbooks running Windows XP? Perhaps it doesn't need to. Google has done a very good job of craftily sticking their do-gooder, free-web-service-providing hands everywhere they could over the last several years. But aside from their search engine, where they enjoy a comfortable margin over all other competitors, none of their other products can be considered dominant. Gmail is listed behind both Yahoo mail and Windows Live Hotmail. Google Maps is listed behind Mapquest (barely). Android is not quite keeping pace with the iPhone, and it's safe to say Google Docs have not exactly replaced Microsoft Office. So maybe Google is just content to get their feet wet, make a few statements, and and chip away at the unhappy edges of Microsoft's market. Their cashcow search engine isn't under any threat from Yahoo or Bing for supremacy (at least at the moment), so perhaps they just figured it was time to make an entry into yet another market.
Or, maybe it could hit the ground running and take the growing netbook world by storm. The plan is to eventually move to larger notebooks, and with enough early success that could happen sooner rather than later. What do you think? Are you excited about Chrome OS? Does this make you want to do more than sit back, raise an eyebrow and say "hmm" - are you salivating instead? One thing's for sure with Google, there will likely be a lengthy beta, so we may get a taste of it to play with before too long.
So there is a lot of buzz about Chrome OS, and rightly so - it's exciting to think about a Google powered alternative to Microsoft or other open source OSs. But wait - we've seen this all before. Just subtract that exhilarating OS suffix and remember that Chrome the browser was the exact same sort of challenge to Internet Explorer and Firefox. And although it has been steadily rising, even the intenet-savvy community over at w3schools uses Chrome only 6% of the time. There was a lot of buzz about that too, and yet adoption has been far from widespread.
The Chrome OS will start off on netbooks in 2010, and should be fast and very web-centric. But will it do better than all those fateful (ie: returned within 30 days) Linux builds, which were swiftly exchanged for netbooks running Windows XP? Perhaps it doesn't need to. Google has done a very good job of craftily sticking their do-gooder, free-web-service-providing hands everywhere they could over the last several years. But aside from their search engine, where they enjoy a comfortable margin over all other competitors, none of their other products can be considered dominant. Gmail is listed behind both Yahoo mail and Windows Live Hotmail. Google Maps is listed behind Mapquest (barely). Android is not quite keeping pace with the iPhone, and it's safe to say Google Docs have not exactly replaced Microsoft Office. So maybe Google is just content to get their feet wet, make a few statements, and and chip away at the unhappy edges of Microsoft's market. Their cashcow search engine isn't under any threat from Yahoo or Bing for supremacy (at least at the moment), so perhaps they just figured it was time to make an entry into yet another market.
Or, maybe it could hit the ground running and take the growing netbook world by storm. The plan is to eventually move to larger notebooks, and with enough early success that could happen sooner rather than later. What do you think? Are you excited about Chrome OS? Does this make you want to do more than sit back, raise an eyebrow and say "hmm" - are you salivating instead? One thing's for sure with Google, there will likely be a lengthy beta, so we may get a taste of it to play with before too long.
