The recent announcement by Google about its upcoming release of the Chrome Operating System has received various reactions from the industry ranging from praise for enabling cloud computing to fear of a Google hegemony and even requests to remove Eric Schmidt from the board of Apple. These discussions, while important, do not focus enough on what the impact to the consumer will be.
In our daily lives, rarely do we pay much attention about the “Operating System” (until it crashes of course). Windows, Mac OSX, even Linux implementations merely serve as interfaces between hardware and user. What we care about are the content and applications that thrive on the operating system. People use computers to access e-mail, write documents, review spreadsheets, manage pictures, access content on the web, etc. While these activities have traditionally been carried out using programs that reside on the consumer’s own physical computer, recent changes in technology have upset the status quo.
Cloud-based services represent the idea that content viewed – and used – by consumers no longer needs to reside on the computer itself but can live on the internet – or as some call it, in the “Cloud”. The use of cloud-based services has been facilitated over the past several years by enabling web browsers and the associated code of the applications to both view content and interact with it. This type of change saw the birth of services like Hotmail, where users do not need to be on any one specific computer to read or write e-mail messages, to more complex things such as Google Spreadsheets, online games, online reservation systems, and so forth.
As more and more content became available and usable online, the next logical step was to develop the underlying infrastructure (the Operating System) to make it faster and simpler. With fewer applications residing “on” the computer and more and more in the cloud, many of us have wondered why operating systems have remained so complex and cumbersome, often leading to crashes and difficulties. Google’s effort to release an operating system around “speed, simplicity and security” is exactly what consumers needs. Of course, just like any product, Chrome OS may not be perfect and may have issues, but that’s not the point. The interesting thing here is the benefits that this will bring to consumers.
- First, Google now will offer legitimate competition to Microsoft. While Apple has been the primary competitor against Microsoft, it has been targeting higher-end users and its market share remains fairly low. Some argue that Apple plays in a different market than Microsoft and as such doesn’t truly compete against the giant. Though Linux has been a viable alternative, it has generally failed to attract individual consumers. Google on the other hand is a consumer-based business and there is no doubt that Chrome will be competing directly against Microsoft. As we have discussed several times, we believe that competition is healthy for the industry and great for consumers, as it leads to more choices at lower prices.
- Speaking of prices, this one will be hard to beat. The Google Operating System will be free, making it instantly attractive to many. Surely some will prefer to continue to pay for Microsoft for its familiarity and for the customer support. Though free, Google software to date has not come with any level of support, which Microsoft will undoubtedly tout as its differentiator along with general software maturity (which many will argue).
- Greater platform choice. In its announcement, Google stated that the “Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips”. Several platform providers are already working to develop Chrome-compatible netbooks such as HP and Acer, Asustek and Lenovo, and there are of course several rumors that Dell will follow suit. Earlier Linux machines, for example, never received the platform support that Chrome already has, and this fact alone bodes well for the future success of Chrome.
These benefits highlight the important concept that operating systems are starting to be commoditized. There were three important components that needed to be commoditized in order for cloud-like services to succeed widely.
- Hardware: with netbooks now within the few hundred dollars range, hardware has become affordable. One netbook doesn’t differ much fromanother, in that that they all provide sufficient web access at a sufficiently low cost.
- Bandwidth: we’ve also previously discussed the trend of bandwidth commodization, and everywhere we travel we continue to see cheap, sometimes free, internet access.
- Operating System: the fact that Google is turning the OS into a commodity is even more important than all the other benefits combined.
With all three of these components commoditized, the path is open for better leverage and penetration of cloud-like services. Consumers will now be able to focus on the information, not the infrastructure they need to reach and interact with that content. As we see the focus now shifting increasingly to web-based applications offering services tbilled based on usage, it becomes apparent that while Google, by introducing Chrome, made one small step towards bringing software-as-a-service to the market, this advance is nothing compared to the giant leap made in how consumers will interact with data and people around the world.
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As I’ve pointed out before, I’ve been a PC guy most of my life and have only been using Macs for the last two years. The biggest takeaway for me has been that Microsoft and Apple are really pretty even: they both pose as poster children for anti-competitive practices, generally favor proprietary code over open source, and make very questionable ethics calls.
I often find myself in the situation where there are too many simultaneous data transfers going on over my Wi-Fi at home: I’ll be watching a TV show on my Apple TV (which streams from the Drobo, see 
I hate to be blogging about Apple again, but it has been quite ubiquitous of late and given that I own an iPhone, an Apple TV, a Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro, I cannot help caring.