Chrome coloured Windows, anyone?
|
The New York Times wrote in its editorial - There is a kind of bloodthirsty thrill in learning that Google plans to develop a personal computer operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows. That’s what it is, a bloodthirsty thrill. With Google announcing its intent to launch Chrome OS — an open source, lightweight operating system — for the netbooks by 2H10, we wonder whether Google can actually live in direct competition with Microsoft. Google’s case Think of it this way, Chrome OS comes with the promise to expand the usage of web-based apps and services, stimulating search and page view volumes, which are critical to Google’s ad-based monetisation strategy. Second, this move exerts a price and margin pressure on Microsoft’s netbooks business plan unerringly when Win7 launch is just around the corner. Lastly, Chrome OS will ensure a continued availability of its search, apps and services even if Microsoft insists on a tighter coupling of Win7 and Bing. Already, over 30 million people are using Google’s Chrome browser, says Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, Engineering Director on Google’s official blog. You might have noticed that Google has also done away with the “Beta” label from its Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. This move, we believe, sends out a signal to enterprise buyers that Google apps has reached a degree of maturity and that it should be considered as a viable option to Microsoft Exchange and Office. Enterprises could find Google’s cloud-based app strategy compelling if the total cost of ownership of software, infrastructure and support services remain attractive. Microsoft’s case The strongest segments of the PC market have been the netbooks followed closely by consumption in the emerging markets. The lower-priced version of Windows XP is the only operating system that currently runs on netbooks. However, Windows 7 OS, when it is released, will also run on netbooks and allows Microsoft the ability to re-evaluate product and pricing for netbooks. It is widely expected that a version of Windows 7 will have a price in line with the current XP version, to help Microsoft get an easy entry in the netbook space. Win7 is also said to fix many of Vista’s problems, including better ease of navigation, start-up time, general performance, and compatibility. Microsoft too believes that as economy improves, the new Win7 could help spur PC and thereby the company revenues. The verdict Google’s new Chrome OS has grown directly out of its browser, also called Chrome, which was introduced last year. Google could see lasting benefits by bringing together incremental traffic through its OS and applications. The technical drawback that stares Google in the eye is that 70 per cent of enterprise applications cannot run in a browser (Google’s Chrome is essentially a browser-based OS) and there are major limitations to the amount of computing that can be done within a browser today. Experts also allege that while the Linux kernel underneath Chrome OS could be packaged up with a suite of peripheral driver controllers, it is not clear who, if anyone, would provide on-going patches, critical bug fixes and other updates for Chrome OS on Linux. Seems like Microsoft will not let the Google Chrome OS steal away the thunder. |
(13 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...Disclaimer
All the content posted in the 'Business Standard Blogs' section, unless specified otherwise, are made by Business Standard employees. The content posted in 'Business Standard Blogs' does not follow routine internal Business Standard reviews and editorial processes and should be considered only as the views and opinions of the employees and not of Business Standard.
September 10th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
U six commentators above…It seems u guys have no idea of technology business at all… open door policies of Google is gonna kick ass out of just about any Microsoft OS that you have used in last thirty odd years… please don’t talk left right center just because your momma heard abt Microsoft in life before.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
How does Chrome OS gel with Google’s stated mission of organising all the information in the universe (whilst, ahem, doing “no evil)”?
Is it just a play for cyber-domination — to displace Microsoft’s control of the man/machine interface, the gatekeeper game, and take over our cyberlives?
Is this a case of Google-o-mania?
July 12th, 2009 at 4:31 am
Netbooks run on Linux and Windows XP as they are powered by less powerful processors(Intel ATOM). There is today a linux alternative to Windows for netbooks. Yet its not caught on in a big way. Reason in my view is familiarity with Windows. Same would apply to Chrome. In fact despite announcing end of life for XP, MS has kept it alive only for netbooks.
I do not think there is a great appeal to business to move to Chrome. Individual users especially students and young ppl, however may gravitate to it. Google has introduced hosted conversations called Google Wave through which it plans to change the way ppl use emails and bring all the conversations to the web as hosted conversations. Companies will not allow that due to security reasons.
Success of Chrome will depend on how seamlessly it integrates with the web and what applications it offers on that platform. Building application suite as deep as MS is certainly going to take time. In my view its a nice start, a viable alternative, but as Bing is not Challenging Google in search space anytime soon, I do not think Chrome OS will challenge Windows.
July 11th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Windows 7 is said to run faster than Vista on a netbook. But Chrome OS is designed to run on low-powered Atom and ARM processors, and web-based applications don’t require that much horsepower on the client end so it should be faster still. thats a reason enough to buy the damn OS…
July 11th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Here what is interesting to note is, google is trying to go off focus. Chrome OS can be next Vista.
Supporting linux community could be a better idea.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Turning the Chrome browser into the Chrome OS is technically straightforward, though of course it’ll take a lot of work. A browser already has most of the key elements of any OS: application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow application software to display content and accept user input, store and retrieve data from mass storage, communicate over the Internet, and so on. Google will have to add a driver model and some other things that don’t exist in a browser, but it can learn from how these things are done in existing operating systems, and possibly even borrow much of the code directly from Linux; there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Existing operating systems such as Windows support a far wider variety of programming languages and provide far more services than Chrome OS will, but Chrome will probably be plenty good enough for Netbooks.