Chrome OS: Windows killer?

Nail/Head

That quote about Excel 2003 hits it doesn't it?

For the majority of people, there is nothing you can't do on last year's PC that you can do today. There is nothing that Win7 does that XP doesn't do. There is nothing that Excel 2008 does that Excel 2003 doesn't do.

For a few years, vendors have been selling technology for the sake of it, not for it's new capabilities. Since 2000, people have been using a lower and lower percentage of their own computing power.

The reason XP netbooks have overtaken Linux ones is familiarity. The brand sells it. Google netbooks that look sexy, with all the eyecandy people want and let you YouTube and Facebook to your hearts content (as well as letting you type your assignments on Google Docs) could well be a threat at the low end of the market.

Are we sure?

It seems Google Chrome OS isn't quite what you think. You want to call it "GoogleOS" but it isn't it's "Chrome OS" (or maybe ChromeOS). Chrome is a browser, which should give you a clue what a "Chrome OS" is all about. It seems to be an "on the metal browser". Just enough Linux/GNU to get Chrome running. For "offline" it's sure to use Google's Gears.

So is this a challenger to Windows? Well in some places sure, wherever the uses a browser far more than native apps then Chrome OS might work. Here's the kicker, Chrome OS's performance on the same hardware will be fantastic (compared to IE) and web apps will run far better with Google's JavaScript engine.

So should this give Microsoft sleepless nights? Well not yet, for most users the idea of replacing all of Windows with a web browser isn't going to work, not until there is a huge improvement in web apps. But the early stages of that are happening, and if you're a business thinking of creating some new internal application well a web app has to look like a far better option than creating something for Windows. After all, the browser isn't going anywhere. So yeah, a future without Microsoft, we can ALMOST picture it. Not going to happen tomorrow, but that won't stop Microsoft from worrying.

Android is a far more potent immediate threat, Windows Mobile looks very vulnerable to it, there is no reason it can't scale up to netbooks, laptops and possibly beyond. It isn't "just a browser" but a whole OS in the traditional sense. This should be giving Microsoft sleepless night already.

As for Apple? Perhaps in the short term anything that messes with Microsoft is good for Apple. A lot of Google's innovation is built on WebKit (an Apple technology) and if Google can drive developers to target WebKit (as well as IE) then that helps Apple.

Google will win the netbooks

You cant put a £150 OS (win7) onto a £100 netbook. So if MS doesn't drop win prices chromeOS will win big.

If MS does reduce price - google may have lost the battle - but may win the war by taking a lot of money MS may have had if chrome OS had not existed.

Its a win win for Google and a win win for linux in general as the improvements google make will be used by others.

What about gOS cloud?

Doesn't http://www.thinkgos.com/cloud/index.html do exactly what Google want to do??

Anyway, it'll be great as a dual boot option.

There can come a tipping point...

Last month when we went camping there were two enthusiastic 'power users' who'd switched to Ubuntu and were raving about it.

My laptop dual boots Vista/Ubuntu - and the difference is absolutely staggering. Vista is painfully slow - Ubuntu runs so much faster and has so many more features and basically just lets me get on with my work - it must save me at least 15 hours a week in comparison to using Vista.

Once the PHB's find it fashionable to be cool and say how they've transferred depts over to Ubuntu based PC's and they've been able to lay off all their PFY's you may see a tipping point in action.

And the reason I think it will happen is because Ubuntu is SO much better than Windows.

The guys who may have to watch out or the Floundering Amateurs who currently fake a living by rebooting PC's and clicking next repeatedly.

Piracy in the developing world

MS - and equally Adobe with Photoshop - know full well that piracy helps them 'lock in' customers - imagine the outcry if people had all had to pay for Word when it was effectively the default format people used for documents on the web (it was such a throwback to encounter a restaurant menu as a Word .doc the other week).

Far better to get a business economy locked into your ecosystem, and then pursue the legal route against businesses (who tend to be more compliant than individuals) than risk pushing a developing economy into using something else.

(It's only now that MS are seriously pushing for license revenue from China, that the Chinese govt is seriously looking at Linux).

As for whether people fear change - it's difficult to tell - they have less problems replacing Nintendos with Playstations with XBox systems, even though there is no software compatibility.

And Apple's fortunes changed when they stopped trying to get people to 'switch' (what I've got works for me, so why change?) and started marketing the Mac as desirable in itself.

The key for any Chrome products is to do the same - not to present themselves as 'PCs with limitations'.

As with Excel so with everything else

Telling the whole train might make the man an idiot. But not upgrading for upgrades' sake? Given the trouble and expense, that excel-using traveller seems relatively sensible to me.

Definitely Not a Windows Killer

I don't think the idea of having just a web browser that can run offline addons in a debian-like environment is going to come anywhere close to killing Windows. Take, for example, Macintosh. Most people would widely agree that Macs are nice computers and that the operating system is fast, efficient and secure (the latter a really bad rumor spread my Apple, they're easier than Windows to attack). Given all of that, they still have done little but chip away at Microsoft's earnings. In fact, a good chunk of Mac users, some 33% if I remember correctly, dual boot with Windows or have a Windows machine as well.

Google may capture a good portion of the Netbook market. A market that's slowly becoming less popular due to dissatisfied customers and retailers misunderstanding the difference between a netbook and a notebook.

It will be as popular as Chrome itself

i.e. a few die-hard Google fans will evangelise it but no-one else will care.

Corporate politics rather than tech advance

I think this is more a corporate turf battle rather than anything that should genuinely excite users technically. I still get some buggy problems with Google Chrome, so they haven't convinced me that they have a IE killer browser yet, let alone a Wndows lkiller. Perhaps its the type of thing I would install as a dual boot since I love Googles willingness to try out new concepts and ideas, so I don't mind giving them space . Windows of course is becoming like alcohol to the alcoholic. We have become so dependent on it it would be impossible and possibly unwise to get rid of it. It is also not as bad as the geek world would make you believe. However,in the eyes of Microsoft , Windows shines on the computer world with the splendor of a great celestial orb floating majestically through cyber space. Of course from the users perspective, we know that the celestial spheres are nothing more than a massive agglomeration of celestial junk randomly crashing onto the planets surface, which has now become beautifully smooth and spherical only because it has collapsed under its own weight.

Google OS is more likely to be like an ugly little asteroid folating around the bigger planet!

There will be no Google/Chrome/whatever Os, ok?

Google will never be able to pass through the ranks of computer manufacturers and resellers who are all sworn to Microsoft. These two lines of defense will allow Microsoft to better concentrate on milking any price they want from their loyal but hapless and familiarity loving user base. Forget Linux and Apple.

As for the Android, forget everything you heard about it, it never existed. Oh, and large masses of computer users rejected it because they can't run Photoshop on it.

El Reg, where is our I.V.Stalin icon please ?

Distro confusion?

There's no problem with Linux distros. Most people just grab whatever distro the press are raving about currently - right now it's obviously Ubuntu. Anyone who wants to investigate a little further must be a hardcore geek anyway, so they're unlikely to be freaked out by having plenty of choices available.

@censored

Too right.

WinXP was the "Baby Bear" Windows. Win98 gave you lots of flexibility and decent speed, but crashed too often. Win2K locked everything down too tight and tended to be slow, but was more reliable. WinXP was the first one which let you get on with things, but also kept a good level of reliability (in its final incarnation, it's *way* stable).

I just don't get the whole Vista/Win7 thing. What do we want an OS to do? Answer: run stuff efficiently and reliably. WinXP was a done deal on that front. If MS had had some balls (instead of some Ballmers), they'd have said "Our work here is done" and put their dev team onto something else. Instead they've gone with the marketing glitz to put an unnecessary pretty interface on it all, which totally saps processing speed and RAM.

Meantime, what do we want Office apps for? Mostly it's just typing in docs or spreadsheets. Forget Office 2003 - there's nothing much significant since Office 97 on that score. And BTW, Google's much-touted "cloud" apps aren't even as capable as Word 6 or Excel 4.

All we really want is to get stuff done. Until 2 years ago, I was still using a 6-year-old AMD Duron 800 with a mobo that still had an ISA slot on it. The only reason I replaced it was because the processor died - it was still doing its job perfectly adequately. I now do a lot of sound mixing, and my single-core Athlon 1600 with 1GB RAM is just fine.

Unless you have very specific requirements (and that's mainly gaming), you simply don't need multi-core PCs with huge amounts of RAM, and you don't need the latest Windows, and you don't need the latest Office. This has been true for at least 5 years, and will only become more valid in future.

Yeah, Google can throw a new OS at us. But why bother? What we have works. Until Google can make theirs work better, they lose. And so far they don't have better apps, they don't have a better browser, and it's impossible to run most other apps on their setup. How stupid would you have to be to buy that?

It is NOT a fucking OS! It's a GUI! Furrfu!

And gawd/ess knows, Linux needs YetAnotherGUI[tm] ... All this GooCroOS thingie is going to do is further fragment the small pool of decent GUI developers.

Marketing will be first up against the wall ...

Developing world

The real problem with piracy and also with the GNU license is that they stifle the formation of professional software and media industry. You know if you make music or movies in China, you won't be able to sell one dime's worth of it, because it will all be stolen. So sure, amateurs can do stuff in their spare time, but then you get Fred@Youtube, not Lord of the Rings. And similarly, GNU licensing means you are forced to give away all your secrets or ideas for your programs and business plans, and again others will just take it.

Me 2,304,117

"I was on the train a few nights ago when some idiot was telling the whole carriage how he had no intention of being forced to upgrade to Excel 2007 when he was perfectly happy with Excel 2003"

I'm right there with the man--and he's certainly no idiot. If a particular release of an application still does the job you need to do, why the hell succumb to a case of feeping creaturism? Migrating to a new release an application just for the shiny factor is economic foolishness; not only are you out the cost of the software, you're out the time-and-resources cost of having to learn the new release.

In 2009, I'm still using some late-1980s DOS-based applications by choice, BECAUSE THEY DO THE JOB I NEED TO DO. Go thou, and do likewise.

@Graham Bartlett

"How stupid would you have to be to buy that?"

You'd have to be pretty stupid because it will be free.

RE: Windows killing

I think many people here are missing the point regarding "Windows killer" OS options, namely that the market to fight over is the new PC owner market (i.e. people new to owning PCs), not the existing market.

Virtually no-one acquires a different OS to run on their existing PC, OK some people try Linux or play with RCs on spare kit but the vast majority buy a PC and leave it as-is until the hardware is obsolete when they buy a brand new PC.

I would also suggest that the vast majority of replacement PC buyers buy a version of they are already using - in most cases it will be either the latest version or the version punted by the manufacturers.

In all these cases there will be a heavy slant towards Microsoft Windows.

@It all lies with the PC vendors

Vendors have pretty slim margins - a return rate of 5% can wipe out their profitability pretty quickly. That's why vendors will continue to stick with Windows - there's no need for wild conspiracy theories about Microsoft paying Vendors off.

upgrading to shiny new things when you dont need to

The Excel thing..really? Not sure what the point of that was but most of the article screamed..what is new and shiny is good and what is old and tested is bad..even if it works and does everything you need it to. upgrading for the sake of it is just stupid. is there something vital missing from the older version?

This quote also says the same "more focused on design attributes which drive the consumerist desires we all share". You might, I look for features vs price.

get the shiny things! oo same thing but different colours? must pay full price again.

humbug.

Who's the idiot?

"I was on the train a few nights ago when some idiot was telling the whole carriage how he had no intention of being forced to upgrade to Excel 2007 when he was perfectly happy with Excel 2003 – and the year is now 2009."

I can't understand why this chap deserves to be branded an idiot for choosing not to do something without a reason, especially when it's probably going to cost him a few hundred pounds - and for what?

If he's an idiot, it must either because he's talking in too loud a voice on a train, or more likely, it's because he hasn't figured out that he can use the most up to date version of OpenOffice absolutely free and still have full access to all versions of his existing office documents.

The idiot

@Peter Snow good point, and it was the former - he was competing for volume with someone else who sounded like he wanted to pack in his job (everyone else in the carriage nearly joined in). As I understand it it was a corporate upgrade, so the main cost would have been in his productivity as he switched. To be honest, apart from the fact he was a noisy git, I had a lot of sympathy!