Putting the cart before the OS
MICROSOFT’S obituary has been written many times, but this trend reached fever pitch last week when Google announced it was going to compete head-to-head with the world’s largest software maker by producing its own operating system.
This is no doubt a significant development, and one that the industry has been crying out for over the years. Many have tried to tackle Microsoft’s monopoly.
There was IBM’s OS2, Apple’s OSX, Linux — including Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu, and so on.
But hang on. Let’s just take a step back here and look at a few facts.
Google Chrome OS is a product that won’t be available until next year, and is built on the back of a web browser that has only grabbed two percent of global market share in the 10 months since it launched.
Chrome is faster and is more of a conduit to Google services than anything else, but it lacks the features most sophisticated browser users are accustomed to.
Had Mozilla announced it was building an OS-based on Firefox, which has captured over 20 percent of the browser market share from Microsoft’s commanding, once-95 percent, then Redmond should really have been worried.
What you’re seeing is a sophisticated game of one-upmanship between the two biggest gorillas in the room: Microsoft and Google.
No sooner had Microsoft announced its competitor to Google’s search — renamed Bing.com from Live.com, renamed from MSN Search dot whatever it was before — than there were strident headlines that Bing was stealing Google’s market share.
As it turns out “that amounts to a month-to-month increase of just under half a percentage point following Bing’s debut”, reported Business Week, using statistics from web stats firm StatCounter. Bing has some appealing features, but that’s the subject of another column entirely.
Then, last week, Google announced that arguably the world’s longest beta trial was coming to end when it officially declared that Gmail (its answer to Microsoft’s Hotmail), Google Apps (its free online alternative to Microsoft Office), Google Talk (its instant messenger equivalent to MSN Messenger) and Google Calendar were out of beta.
These are all great products that I use, and this announcement has more to do with convincing large companies that they can now trust Google and not a product that is still “beta” and therefore not ready for final release.
The next day Google announced it was making Chrome — its answer to browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has just received an upgrade in IE8 — into an operating system. It’s aimed specifically at netbooks, the mini-notebooks that are the hottest-selling item since the iPod and iPhone.
Why did Google announce a product so far in advance? Because today is when Microsoft is due to announce its latest operating system, Windows 7 — a much- improved response to Vista — arguably Redmond’s biggest failure, despite all the copies it might have sold. Windows 7 is the best software Microsoft has made in years, and has garnered compliments from a previously hostile press and other geeks who’ve suffered through Vista.
Google has effectively stolen Microsoft’s thunder.
But Chrome OS presents a flawed argument. Netbooks are great devices, make no mistake, but they are lesser computers with low specs and designed for using Web2.0 services. Originally netbooks featured Linux to keep their cost down, but consumers showed reluctance to switch to open-source systems on netbooks — which is what Chrome OS will be — because of their familiarity with Windows.
As soon as XP was available for netbooks, their uptake soared and Linux netbooks are now few and far between, except among the geeks who install Ubuntu themselves.
Chrome OS, then, has an uphill battle, especially with Windows 7 being more suited to netbooks, and integrating well with online services, especially Microsoft’s Live range.
But the most important, if not exactly thrilling, news of last week was that VLC released version 1.0 of its excellent video player (www.videolan.org). Anyone who has struggled to play a video file knows VLC just works, no matter what. If only all software was this reliable.
Microsoft versus Google discussion
The Times
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