Chrome OS – Google Gorilla To Eat Microsoft’s Breakfast
Heads up Balmer, The boys at Google are on the hunt. Larry and Sergey are planning a strategic strike at the heart of Microsoft’s flagship product, Windows.
In a recent announcement on The Official Google Blog, Google says they are ramping up a new hopeful in the OS market — Chrome OS.
If Chrome OS runs with speeds anything like Google Chrome (the browser), then Microsoft is staring up the nose of a 300-pound gorilla.
Web surfing in 3 seconds? Google has this to say:
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.
Google is banking on their vision of web-everything. No more local data on your workstation. No more backups. Lower hardware compatibility problems. Portability. In other words, park everything you have on the internet:
They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.
Google is promising us security, speed and functionality with Chrome OS. These are all areas of daily computing that in some way or shape have given us all lousy experiences with Microsoft.
With cloud computing taking a firm hold on the internet and broadband speeds bouncing higher and higher, there’s little reason why Google’s vision can’t come through to reality.
Just imagine-
Flip your computer on and in a few brief seconds be on the web surfing, checking email and plowing through your daily computing needs. Insane concept, but now closer to reality — thanks to Google.
Microsoft, however, isn’t just sitting idle on the secure browser sidelines watching all this Google hype go down. They’re chalk-boarding their own game plan for a ‘multi-principle OS’ code named, Gazelle.
This takes the browser [or OS?] wars to an all new new level in the tit-for-tat software battle. Gentlemen, choose your operating weapon.
Sounds interesting… but I'll believe it when I see it. I've tried Google Chrome, and it is definitely good, but currently a little *too* minimal to be truly useful – if they can flesh it out a bit more and make it work better with other Google products (Bookmarks, Reader, etc.) I would give it another go.
One thing that I wonder about regarding the OS is whether or not they'll be able to strike the right balance between simplicity (and speed) versus security – Microsoft chose poorly in the past with Windows, and have had to live with the consequences to this day – hopefully the Google engineers have read up on what MS did wrong so they know what to avoid…
I'm really curious to see what Google does with a Linux distro. Oughta be quite interesting, especially since they mentioned a new windowing system. Makes me wonder if they're planning on writing their own or using Chrome as the basis for the windowing system.
Either way, looks intriguing and should make for some fun!
Near-instant boot-ups to a browser environment are not new in the least. A lot of new motherboards come with this technology built in. This really isn't all that novel as a base concept, but we'll see what they actually come up with.