Proxama Blog

Chrome OS

Thought I’d go a bit off-topic with this post in light of the news that Google is releasing an operating system, which I thought was a fairly predictable move.  Victoria has pointed me at a funny article with some criticism of the move:

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and-get-some.html

And I basically wanted to take it apart, because I think it’s wrong in so many places!

Writing an operating system is hard, of course I agree Windows has taken years to refine, and Linux sucks for end-users when it comes down to it.  However anyone who knows large-scale software development knows that software decay is inevitable, and as a project gets larger the tasks become more difficult (The Mythical Man Month anyone?), I believe a fresh modern approach to the problem may be surprisingly productive.  There’s a similar parallel with mobile phone operating systems (also huge, complex and under-estimated) – iPhone to Symbian.  I imagine though that this is exactly why netbooks are being targeted first:

• They’re slow.   It’s easier to up-scale than down-scale, if the target of “quick” is met on netbooks, it will only run quicker on a desktop.
• Hardware is new and supported.  The big fall-point from Linux is lack of proper hardware support, I shouldn’t think Google will have too much problem getting cooperation from these limited hardware manufacturers.
• They’re positioned well with the Google “always connected” mentality.  I don’t think many people can deny it’s changed how the internet is used, cloud computing and all that.
• It’s an excellent stepping stone to target initially.  Microsoft may not lose profit if they’ve lost the netbook market, but they may be threatened because Google can now easily attack the desktop.

Google has always pushed a “loads of experimental projects, kill them if they don’t work” mentality – that’s why they’re so innovative with things like gmail and google-docs.  So plenty of platforms helps this environment and I don’t agree there is overlap internally at Google.  I would only say what I’ve always said – Android on netbooks is a waste of time, it’s designed for phones & the architecture reflects that – maybe try more than one average handset first.  Further the key difference between Android and Chrome OS will be the presence of a GSM stack, there isn’t really any functional overlap.

So I think Chrome OS will be successful, I think the plan is solid and Google will drive it to work.  Long-term I think there are security and privacy issues with cloud-computing, that may cause a privacy backlash in future.  There were some early signs of this with documents hacked then leaked from Twitter this week. Also as Google anticipates providing the backend services for Chrome OS (gmail, chat, docs, calendar), the effect and damage of downtime will be exacerbated. Google can't be naive about the responsibility they're taking on by producing this “connected” OS.  Plus finally there’s research to suggest that high-bandwidth applications are pushing the limits of internet infrastructure, and that will cause reliability issues in future. 

Oh and Chrome getting 1.5% market in less than 1 year, occupied by users who couldn’t tell you what a browser is – less than 8%.  I think that’s pretty good.

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0 Comments. Posted by James 15 July 2009

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