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All your OS are belong to us!

July 8, 2009 — Thomas

Thomas: It’s official. The Google OS is alive and kicking, and will be in amongst us in a mere 12 months time. But what is it? (We speculated some time ago) The press release is short on details, the only technical details being that this is a new windowing system build on a Linux kernel. What I’m expecting is a very skiny Linux distro, booting in seconds straight into an interface where everything is built on HTML. Just enough code to display google.com. Where Windows has bloated to include media players, DRM, backup software, the Google OS will point you to web apps for all the extra functionality you could need. If I worked in marketing I’d probably describe it as a window into the cloud!

My Macbook isn’t running scared but Chrome OS could certainly give Ubuntu NBR a run for its money on my Eee PC. If Google make a good job of this (and I see no reason why they shouldn’t) it could finally give some stability and unification to the Linux desktop as a whole. At the moment geeks debate the benefits of x.org over xfeee86, and Gnome over KDE. I’m not suggesting we would be better without any of these projects, but if one was to be presented as a clear victor and common standard it would make software easier to code and use for everyone. The new Google window system could be the very thing that solves this problem.

Last time we spoke about this we decided Google would ignore the OS, we figured that as long as there was competition in the OS market Google would have a way for customers to use its search and see its adverts. Maybe we should have learned a lesson from Chrome the browser; good browsers existed before Chrome, but Google was not content to leave its future in someone elses hands!

How will todays big news affect you?

google-jet Martin: At first I thought this was going to be a truly huge story, and it is, although for the time being it seems that Google are focusing on the Netbook market rather than going for a full knockout blow against MS. This lightweight OS will work on full size machines though and may be ideal for what a large percentage of normal users do with their machines. If you can use the web and the basic apps that Google provides then it is ideal for the technophobe man in the street.

The main thing that interests me is that while this is just another flavour of Linux to you, it may be the acceptable face of Linux to people like me. A lot of people think that anything involving Linux or ‘the cloud’ is a bit too geeky and maybe too technical. Google is a name that we know and use everyday. I think a lot of the people who spec their Netbooks with Windows because they don’t know what ‘Um Bongo’ is even though it costs them £50 more might just go for Google.

Who knows from there, maybe this will be the next big thing. In 5 years we could all be using the Chrome OS and doing our computing in the cloud, or we might be using Windows 9 or OSX 10.8 and Chrome could hold a 3% market share. As we said last time, I don’t know if Google really want to be our OS provider, I still think they are more keen on getting us to look at ads while we use their services – regardless of how we get to them. Perhaps the strategy will unfold as we learn more about this story over the next 12 months.