Six reasons why Google’s Chrome OS announcement is HUGE

Google's Chrome Browser will soon be running on Google's very own Chrome OS.

This is massive news for the IT industry by any measure. It had been anticipated for a long time and feverishly denied by Google every time speculations appeared in the press. However, they’ve come out and admitted it now. Google is busy at work building their very own desktop for mainstream desktops, netbooks and laptops. The project is being called “Chrome OS“, and as the name implies, it is designed to optimize the user’s internet/web experience. The idea is to rethink the OS stack from scratch and bake in remote service leverage or the ability to ‘tap into the cloud’ at a fundamental, architectural level.

The Chromium code-base has been evolving in an interesting fashion; many of the early features that distinguished it from other browsers involved OS-like functionality. For example, the ability to run each tab as a separate process, thus isolating concurrent web apps. Or the focus on a much faster and more efficient implementation of the Javascript virtual machine allowing web apps to be less lethargic and more usable. There’s a lot more to be done in these areas, but obviously, with Chrome OS, Google now has a great platform to build on. We’ll have to wait until the middle of 2010 to get our hands on Chrome OS, but you never know… there are always leaks, alphas and betas. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are reviews out there by the end of the year.

One can go on and on and wax eloquent about how this is a threat to Microsoft (which it obviously is), how Google will rule the world and other such subjective – but interesting – rhetoric. However, I’d rather focus on the core reasons why I believe this to be a really, really important change for the industry as a whole. So here I go:

1. Google is the only company, with the exception of Microsoft, that actually has the reach, distribution, technology capability and datacenter capacity, to PUSH the cloud computing model and MAKE it mainstream. My estimates of the likelihood of mainstream, cloud computing taking off have gone up substantially due to this announcement.
2. This OS, probably for the first time in history, is not about the hardware that it runs on, but about the services it taps from the network. This means that the network will appear to the application developer as an almost seamless extension of the local computing device. While I am off on a limb on this one since there isn’t much data available on the architecture of Chrome OS at the moment, yet, I’m happy to put up a substantial wager. As a consequence of the network focus, application development will be impacted substantially – and in a good way. The biggest positives we could get out of this are network I/O enhancements that allow for greater reliability, non-blocking requests, graceful adaptation to external conditions and an easy-to-use application interface that makes so-so developers capable of building decent network based apps.
3. Google is deeply invested in ensuring ubiquitous web/internet access. This is how they increase the overall pool of ‘available eyeballs’, which is really the only variable that matters for their business model. With Google’s presumably free Chrome OS, we can be sure that all-in $100 netbooks will materialize and internet usage will extend rapidly to the 3 or so billion who can’t use it today. See #6.
4. This might be the death of mainstream, paid-for consumer software. The licensed software model has been dying slowly plagued with almost insurmountable ills for quite a while now. This might just kill it. The next target will be Microsoft Office, which Google is already competing against. With the launch of Chrome OS, Google Docs will get a performance and reliability boost. Unless Google suddenly goes brain-dead right before the Chrome OS launch, they will probably announce Google Docs upgrades and new features in conjunction with, or soon after, the Chrome OS launch. The Windows+Browser+Office combo equals 90% of consumer computing needs and Google is making all of it free.
5. Chrome OS is likely to include Google Gears as a fundamental component of the stack. This means the OS will natively support offline web applications, thus overcoming a key criticism of the Cloud/network computing model. Integrated into the OS, it will run a lot faster and will become a ‘default assumption’ for many web developers. This will also change the way most web apps are written.
6. It’s not just the software industry, but the HW industry too, that should think hard about what this announcement means. Netbooks are already the only growth category in consumer computing. Desktops and Laptops have been hit both by the economic conditions and the ‘adequateness’ of a netook. A netbook might be enough horsepower for most people so why should they splurge on what is now looked upon as a utility, not a luxury? With Chrome OS, the OS and most of the apps will be free and all focus reverts to how cheap the hardware can be. The extra 10-20 points that OEM might make from a Windows license ($10-$20) go away and you are thus back to paying the absolute bare minimum for hardware. This shift has probably already mortally wounded Dell, and I don’t think the consumer mentality engendered by Chrome OS and similar efforts will make life any easier.

We were told for a long time that free = no innovation. Google is a living example of how that is not the case. Free AND Innovative is almost impossible to beat. Arguably, by leveraging a non-license, advertising driven revenue stream Google has eclipsed the traditional business models on which the entire software industry was built. That is a serious shift. Let’s see who survives it.