Op-Ed: What is Google up to with its new operating system?

Has Google just fired a cannon shot across Microsoft’s bow? Today’s news of the new Google operating system — Google Chrome OS for netbooks, due to be released in a little more than a year — is being hailed by many people as the Windows killer. It’s not. Most of the Windows-killer talk is just wishful thinking. Of course Microsoft should be worried anyway, because the Chrome OS will definitely chew up a bit of Windows’s near-monopoly on operating systems. But it’s not designed to kill Windows. Hurting Microsoft’s market pre-eminence would be a bonus, but it’s not the point. The purpose is to position Google as a major player in The Next Big Thing: software as a service. And that means Google isn't thinking about individual users at all. Chrome will be a corporate product. This became obvious a year ago when Google released the beta version of its Chrome Web browser, which was mistaken by many people as a simple continuation of the old browser wars, started in late 1995, which lifted Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to dominance and killed Netscape. But the browser wars of the 1990s were waged over features. The new wars are all about operating systems. Google's Chrome browser has been designed to be a simple, fast engine to run Javascript, which is the platform of choice for running online business software. Web applications — like those office suites that you use “in the cloud,” which reside on their maker's systems and are generically referred to as software as a service — have occupied a growing niche in the market. Web apps are the future. The Google Chrome browser came with a browser plug-in called Gears, which was designed to seamlessly launch a Web-based application in exactly the same way that clicking on any desktop icon starts an application already loaded on your computer. By launching a browser whose main purpose is to run Javascript easily and quickly, Google was hinting that it’s aiming itself squarely at computing “in the cloud.” Google’s new operating system will be designed specifically for netbook computers. Why just netbooks? Because the whole concept behind netbooks — computers made exceptionally light and inexpensive by removing extras from them, such as optical drives, too-powerful central processors and massive memory — is that they will be able to run just an operating system and an office suite, and not much else. With online software, an office suite will also become obsolete; everything will run from the embedded browser. All sorts of computers are being made this way, from the ASUS Eee PC to Acer’s Aspire One to Hewlett Packard’s Mini 2140 to even Apple’s Air, each without the optical drive and each being marketed to what their makers call the “mobile professional.” Other manufacturers have gone to the Linux operating system, which can easily be adapted for lean and mean hardware specifications. I’m now playing with the Fidelity VPC (for “very personal computer”), which runs a form of Linux, and Dell recommends installing Fedora, Ubuntu or Open SUSE on its LC Series Netbooks. Even Apple’s iPhone is a move in that direction; Apple boss Steve Jobs has said he means the iPhone to be a truly portable way to access data as well as voice communications. I don’t mean to make this sound like a stampede; in fact, Linux-based netbooks are having trouble gaining market traction; Dell is changing its Linux policy to offer buyers either Linux or Windows XP, and MSI, maker of the Wind U100 Linux-based netbook, announced late last year that four times as many Wind buyers return the Linux models as those who return the Windows XP models. But these are small adjustments that the market will most probably be glad to make once the benefits of netbooks become more evident. Among them is the price; I’ve seen some U.S. ads selling a complete netbook for as low as $139, though most run about $250. At Canadian online retailer Tiger Direct, netbooks hover around the $400 level, while full-fledged notebook computers start at $600 and go north of that. The netbook revolution is very compelling. One of the big concerns for corporate interests is security; theft of a laptop loaded with company files will cost the company a good $1,000 in hardware and incalculable costs in compromised data. If someone steals your netbook with its software-as-a-service system, who cares? You’ve lost maybe $400 and not compromised your data. In 2007, Microsoft’s strategy turned on Silverlight, a rich-media platform that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback, features that are meant to make the online experience rich and fun.. In releasing Silverlight, the software giant startled a lot of people by making it a plug-in for several browsers, including Firefox and Apple's Safari, as well as Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, a rare move for the usually proprietary company. And speaking of Safari, Apple’s browser has also just been updated. And why should Apple make its own browser? For the same reason Google made Chrome and Microsoft added Silverlight as a browser extension: To position their products for a future based on software as a service. In this context, supremacy among operating system makers won’t be decided purely on market acceptance as much as on a total package. Microsoft, Apple and Google will all try to make a product that will attract the business market. The argument will be simple: The right browser will make the operating system almost irrelevant. You should be able to run any online software on Microsoft’s Windows, a Linux platform or even Apple OS X. The strategy is to create an operating system that is so lean and hungry it can run on a very small and cheap computer. Google’s Chrome should move to at the forefront with its new system, which will probably come with a cut-throat price. And Microsoft, which is itself hot on the cloud-computing trail, will probably still be stuffing more features into its operating systems and browsers, making them too bloated to be run on tiny hardware. The only way Microsoft and Apple could possibly compete is to either issue a new rewritten and slenderized version of their operating systems, or beef up their existing mobile systems now working for the cellphone market. But could Microsoft, which has been gambling on an ever-richer computing experience, be willing to offer a minimalist operating system? Most likely, Google doesn't intend to turn Chrome into the world's chart-topping operating system, which is likely to mean it doesn't want to pack it with exciting new features. Chrome's purpose is to give developers a platform to display and run their Web-based applications, and if Chrome can set a standard that will be copied by Apple and Microsoft, then it will have served to promote the real things that Google does. As a footnote: The real outside player in this game is another giant: Adobe. Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005 for one main product: Flash. Not only is it a good system of playing online audio and video (without it YouTube wouldn't exist), but it is being developed by Adobe as part of its platform for running Web-based applications, along with another product, Adobe Air. The Flash player is, after all, the most widely used application in the world, and is a familiar and reliable basis on which to revolutionize the Web.