EmmonsNet

Okay, it's been almost ten days since Google announced their Chrome OS. Ever since that date, all I seem to see on the IT news, geeks sites and blogs is wild speculation as to what the big G's strategy is going to be to beat the snot out of Microsoft on the desktop market.

Frankly, I am tired of seeing all the reading all the drivel by industry speculators that seem to dismiss or are completely ignore a few key truths about the desktop computing market.

The first thing these armchair industry watchers seem to miss is what Google put out there in plain black and white:

 "The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies."

First, I want to point out something many people seemed to miss: Linux kernel.

All of those millions of users that would have no idea how to be productive without MS Office apps? I know - I work with about a dozen of them, and if their office products does not say MS on it somewhere with a stupid paperclip talking to them when they fat finger the wrong key - they are lost and forget how to tab their way through the simplest spreadsheets. Last time I checked, MS does not build office, Access, Power Point or any of their other garbage productivity applications for the linux kernal. So for the herds of office workers around the word will not be running anything but windows anytime soon.

Games? I love desktop computer games and so do millions of other gamers around the world too. So unless a lot game studios started build linux ports for their games this week, we just won't be seeing a huge selection of games on linux either.

Don't mistake my opinion here as one from a MS fan. On the contrary, I think Microsoft writes some of the crappiest bug infested and insecure bloatware on the planet and I avoid installing their software on any of my personal computer hardware where ever possible. Sadly, because I play a certain online RPG whose client is ported only for windows, I must keep a windows partition on one of my desktop computers at home. All of my other hardware runs a mixture of different *nix distributions.

Another thing I need to point out in Google's introduction of the Chrome OS 'the web is the platform'.

If an application does not run in a web browser with the guts of the application code running on a web server somewhere - but requires native compiled binary code and libraries to local to the OS - you can forget about it running on the Chrome OS. The only exceptions I see here are Flash / Shockwave / Java based apps. Because these are already considered standards on the web and run within browsers already, we can assume they will be handled easily by Chrome as browser plugins.

So, what is the Chrome OS really? A glorified browser embedded within an x-windows system on top of the linux kernel with probably little or no viable options to install third party software locally?

Unless I miss my guess, this OS will kick ass on netbooks and other platforms that are designed strictly for surfing the web and nothing more. Given how the kernel will load only the libraries required to run chrome web browser and a few drivers to support the hardware it is installed on - this OS wil, in most instances, boot up and run like a scalded dog.

As much as I would like to see Steve Ballmer get buried until a mountain of chairs thrown by a viable competitor with a war chest like Google has, I don't think  search giant is the one to do it right now.

The Google Chrome OS is truly not in the same market space as Microsoft is in the desktop computing market. Untill the OS gets support for at least as many mainstream third party application studios as Windows does, Chrome will never be a serious direct competitor to Windows.