What Is It Good For?

Thanks to new technologies, ample bandwidth, and Moore's Law, the concept of a Web operating system has become reality. The Web isn't actually an OS in the classical sense of the word, nevertheless is to put it more exactly a platform to do things—make phone calls, play games, write documents, send e-mails, instant message, and even edit photos. These are some of the tasks certain of us old fogeys however do on our desktop operating systems with desktop software. Slowly and surely that desktop era is coming to an end.

Google last week announced its much-awaited cloud OS, the Chrome OS, which is nothing more than a browser running on a stripped-down version of Linux to capitalize on hardware features just as audio and video. Eventually, Chrome is about doing things on the Web, inside a browser. Apple, clearly, has taken a different tack for its cloud OS. The iOS that powers iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad fosters the idea of using small chunks of code for doing specialized tasks and embedding the browser inside these apps.

World where we had reliable disks

So we've gone from a world where we had reliable disks and unreliable networks to a world where we have reliable networks and really no disks. Architecturally that's a huge change—and with HTML5 it is now when all is said and done possible to build the kind of powerful apps that you take for granted on a PC or a Macintosh on top of a browser platform. You can build everything that you used to mix and match with client software, taking full advantage of the capacity of the web.

Consumers are going to find Chrome OS very limiting, especially those with preconceived notions about what a personal computer is supposed to do. Should the contingency arise, the availability of smartphones and tablets makes Chrome OS less necessary from a consumer standpoint because these devices are both more consumer-friendly and quite capable.

The form of phones

Google's own Android OS is already in front of consumers in the form of phones and tablets. Sometime then and there year the first Chrome OS devices will come to the market, and it won't be known until the end of 2011 whether or not Chrome OS can become a viable option in the marketplace. By at the time, as I wrote in May: "Who knows where Android will be?" If the early popularity of tablets is any indication, consumer computing is moving towards the tablet form-factor. For Android, this is come to think of it a good thing.

In comparison, Chrome OS is ideally suited for business environments that need lots of low-cost computers designed to do certain specific tasks cheaply and without much maintenance. Rolling out centrally managed apps, minus security problems and maintenance hassles, has been the Holy Grail for corporate computing. Chrome OS and HTML5-based Web apps that run inside the browser are a perfect solution, as I argued in my previously post.

Chrome OS as well suffers from awkward positioning—both externally, to developers and potential clients, and internally, within Google's own product lineup. During it's true that PCs serve both companies and consumers, the value of the network computer premise appeals only to enterprise IT managers. Its manageability and simplified functionality play best in applications like airline reservations, point-of-sale terminals, and ATMs, or in limited-application mobile devices used in shipping and store inventory management. But, for the moment for nevertheless, app stores are purely consumer offerings. The apps Google showed last week all came from media companies, Electronic Arts, and Amazon.com).

Google should focus Chrome OS and all its energies on business buyers: call centers, retail outlets, and airlines to start with. It should forget about the consumers.