Those Google guys are something else. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the rallying cry was “The Web is the platform of the future”. Yes, I just googled it– it was!
Nice head fake. Here comes Google Chrome OS. It’s all about ‘speed, simplicity and security’, not surprisingly, as well as open-source and aimed mostly at netbooks at first. And OK, the announcement says it will get you “onto the web in a few seconds” & “the user experience takes place on the web”, so maybe it’s not really a policy shift after all.
Digital Media Minute readers will be interested in this:
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. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
A meta-OS, at least nominally.
Microsoft’s approach evolved from OS to browser to a late entry into Search. Now for Google it’s happened in the opposite order, from Search to browser to operating system. Will Chrome OS be similarly set back in the longterm because of its late entry into the operating system game? Also, has Android adoption not happened fast enough for Google? At any rate, it’s hard to fault them for staking claim to more and more of the user experience, as a way of diversifying their business. Stock analysts have been harping on this for years…
The most surprising thing here to me is that Google is introducing internal competition for Android as Google’s OS for future devices, ie handheld as well as netbooks or even desktop computers. Google admits that there will be overlap in their functionality and usage, but “we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.” Hard to say if it’s product differentiation or a long term play to draw the best out of two competing Google teams. At any rate, no one really knows where hardware is going, and it’s hard now to imagine Google not having a competitive answer to whatever features the market will want to see in future operating systems.
Google will open-source the code later this year, with Chrome OS shipping slated for the second half of 2010.
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This will definitely be a blast – for googles behavioural targeting-database :)