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Given its premise, Google plans to aim their featherweight OS at netbooks – at least, initially. They claim to be working with several OEMs to bring Chrome OS-bearing netbooks to market as early as the second half of 2010. The project is fully open source, and its code will be released in the coming months. Chrome OS will run on x86 and ARM chips.
Naturally, this poses a threat to Microsoft as both companies are already strong competitors in various arenas; search, webmail, browsers, mobile operating systems and so on. Redmond, too, has intentions on making its latest OS, Windows 7, available on netbooks – and I’m sure you recall Windows XP showing Linux to the door.
Google has a fantastic opportunity to “fix” something that is often cited as the pitfall of mainstream Linux distros; they can make Chrome OS easy to use. I’m not sitting cross-legged on a mountain - and I’m not computer stupid - but every time I dabble with Linux, I’m put off by the learning curve. Here’s to wishing Google the best of luck.
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Mugsy said:
When Apple moved to the Intel platform for its Macs, I thought for SURE they'd finally release a version of the MacOS... an already tested and established OS with huge support base... that would run on any Intel based PC.
I have no clue why they never did. Software is MUCH cheaper to develop & sell than hardware with a MUCH higher profit margin.
There's several reasons why this never happened. The primary reason is that Apple likes its elite niche, and is a hardware OEM first and foremost. The OS and software products they develop are basically intended to make the users of their proprietary hardware happy, and maybe sell more hardware. If they drop an OS on the general computing public, there is no push to sell their hardware if it works fine on a standard PC, and it just massively increases their support structure that has to be in place - remember, they control the hardware on their stuff, but the PC market is a wild hodge-podge of infinitely variable hardware combinations, making support exponentially more difficult in many cases.
Apple has figured out its niche, its roll in the market, and is happy with it. They are the cool crowd, with strong stable hardware products and the occasional "wow" factor, and they make plenty of money doing waht they do. To try to throw their hat into the ring directly against Windows would just defeat their strategy.
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Google's OS will never be a gaming OS, at least not for many many years. Look how hard it is to get game developers to release games on linux or OS X and those are pretty established (albeit small) markets. Google's OS won't get more adoption than linux and OS X.
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