Google gave us a good first look at its Chrome operating system today. It has some interesting features, but is far from finished – the first devices using it are still a year away.
Google’s ambitions for Chrome also seem modest at present – it will run on low-specification netbooks. But everyone seemed to have low expectations for Google’s other OS – Android – when it was launched last year, and look at it now.
Android is being widely adopted as a potent weapon by handset makers and carriers in their battle with Apple’s iPhone. It is expected to be the second most popular operating system for smartphones, behind Symbian, by 2012.
Chrome faces a different competitive landscape. For starters, there is no Apple netbook, although we may have an Apple tablet soon.
Netbook makers had begun by offering devices using Windows XP or operating systems based on open source Linux. Moblin, an Intel-backed open source option, is now emerging, along with a “Starter” version of Windows 7. Netbooks running Android are also available.
Smartbooks – simpler and smaller versions of netbooks – have failed to appear this year because of Microsoft’s lack of support for devices based on ARM processors and a failure to create robust Linux-based alternatives.
Smartbooks should appear in dozens of options in the first quarter of next year now that Linux has been primed for the devices. They could represent a significant opportunity for the Chrome OS.
So, despite Google coming very late to the game with Chrome OS, there should still be plenty of opportunity to gain market share, given Apple and Microsoft’s absence from the new segments.
Google seems to be purposely limiting itself to netbooks at first because of the “driver” problem.
Microsoft has many years of experience of making its software work with every kind of graphics card, printer, wireless card and a multitude of other peripherals through specific driver software smoothing their interaction.
Achieving this with a new operating system is not trivial, as Sergey Brin, Google co-founder explained to us after the presentation.
“As you ramp one of these OSs, it’s a lot of work to get it to work with any particular set of hardware, so we’re focused on a certain sweet spot if you will and I think, particularly on these cheaper devices, you want them to just work when they open.”
To achieve simplicity, speed, almost instant-on performance and relatively bug-free operation, the Chrome OS team is matching the software to specific hardware components.
That means it will work closely with manufacturing partners. Consumers will be buying netbooks preconfigured for and preinstalled with Chrome OS, rather than trying to download and install the new operating system on their existing computers.
Chrome OS is therefore one small step towards consumer cloud computing. The giant leaps should come if its concepts can spread successfully beyond the netbook category.
