Chrome OS: Haven’t You Heard of Linux?
After reading dozens, and I mean dozens of articles about Chrome OS and how it is going to be a hit to Microsoft and Apple. When reading the articles, they usually run down the features of the operating system, and the announcements that Google made about it.
Here is an example list from ZDnet.
Timing.
Note the 12-18 month delivery: they’ve been watching how M$ freezes the market with “strategic” pre-annoucements.
Pricing.
Free, as in open-source. M$ will have to fight for every dollar from netbook makers. Google should be handing out “Chrome OS” coffee cups to every M$ OEM starting with HP and Dell.
Target.
Developers: “For application developers, the web is the platform. . . . [it will give] developers the largest user base of any platform.”
Goal.
“. . . computers need to get better.” More like a big smartphone and less like a server – a clear swipe at M$.
Market.
“. . . small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” Google is generously ceding the server OS market to M$ and Linux – for now.
Hm. Sounds a lot like something we know already huh?
Let’s go back to pricing. Notice that it says that it will be free and open-source. Just about every Linux distro is open source and completely free, all you have to do is download the disk image and burn it to a disk (excluding SUSE).
Let’s take a look at the market as well. Is linux aimed at netbooks as well? Yes. Linux is so lightweight, just as Google says Chrome OS will be, that it needs very little memory and processing power to run and still be fast, sometimes as little as 256MB-512MB of RAM.
I’m surprised Google gave the OS a target. You shouldn’t be “targeting” any certain group, if you are making an operating system, it’s best that you advertise it to be the best for EVERYONE, not a certain group. Bad on Google’s part. Even if they are including developer tools to really make it “special” for developers, it seems very un-google-like to not target the entire user base.
What’s all the hype about?
JD Remington
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