The tech world loves nothing more than a shiny new product, and Google has just delivered, announcing Chrome OS, “an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.”  In the eyes of virtually every observer, Google Chrome OS is also a shiny new missile aimed right at Microsoft.  “Wow,” wrote Yves Smith. “I never thought I’d see the day when a company made a frontal assault on Microsoft’s core business.” “Google has issued its clearest challenge to rival Microsoft so far,” said Bobbie Johnson.  “If indeed Google puts out a fast, easy to use operating system that lets netbooks soar and free users from constant software patches,” writes Ryan Singel at Wired. “Microsoft will find it very hard to explain to consumers why they should continue to use its software, other than just out of a foolish consistency.”  “This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft,” wrote MG Siegler. “It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, ‘However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.’ Yeah, who do you think they mean by that?”  Indeed, says Michael Arrington, the web is the whole point.  “The new OS will focus entirely on the web,” writes Arrington at TechCrunch. “What that means is this. The browser is the platform. The browser is the UI.”  Now, finally, even the tech purists can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Windows is hardware management plus an application platform, and we call that an OS. Chrome OS is hardware management plus an application platform (the browser), and we call that an OS, too.  Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.  Chrome will do just that. And it will be free, unlike Windows.  Free’s the word of the moment in media tech circles (see “The Fight Over Free,”), and Jeff Jarvis sees “the economics of free” as a key element in the new operating system.  One may try to parse the motives and implications of the move like Latin haiku, but I think it’s simple; it usually is with Google: It saw an opportunity to serve the end user and took it. The more such opportunities it grabs, the more benefit it brings to more people, the more money it makes. Maps, Docs, Reader, Android, book search, translation tools, GoogleNews are all that. . . .  How does Google win? Its products are generally but not always better and cheaper (read: free) because Google’s real secret is that it understands the economics of the internet and competed aggressively not against technology and internet companies but instead it competed for advertisers, selling performance over scarcity. The more Google serves end users – and the more it learns about them – the more opportunities it has. These are the economics of free.  Jason Kottke links to a post he wrote five years ago in which he imagined a future Google OS, and says there’s no need to wait for Chrome. Users already have a GooOS.  In many important ways, the GooOS I was talking about is largely already here and has little to do with Google Chrome OS. The underlying assumption in that post . . . is that all of these apps are running in the browser. Which they now do: Gmail, Google Reader, Google Apps (word processing, spreadsheets), Aviary, Flickr, Pandora, YouTube, IM, etc. There are even online storage and backup mechanisms…do you even need local file storage? Hell, you can even use powerful apps like Mathematica in a browser. With little effort, many people can do 95% of their daily work entirely within a web browser. That’s the real GooOS/WebOS, the important GooOS/WebOS.  According to Douglas Rushkoff, Google Apps were transitioning software, helping “retrain us to work in a networked fashion.”  As more computer users are coming to realize, owning hardware and software is actually more of a liability than an asset. Whether it’s watching a $4,000 laptop fall off the conveyor belt at airport security, contending with a software conflict that corrupted your file management system, or begging your family to stop opening those virus-carrying “greeting cards” attached to emails, all computer owners are highly-leveraged and highly-vulnerable technology investors. . . .  Although Google Apps alone may not have convinced the public of the benefits of cloud computing, the introduction of $100 and $200 “netbooks” like the Asus Eee and Dell Mini 9 liberated users from the myth that owning more computer was somehow better than owning less. Miniature keyboards notwithstanding, netbooks could as easily be “net desktops,” running nimbly on bloatware-free Linux operating systems.  Any problems in a big move to the GooCloud? “The most legitimate concern,” writes Rushkoff, “is whether a Google OS will end up centralizing control of software and data in a previously decentralized universe.”  I’d have to say no. Being essentially forced to use Microsoft Word by a Windows-addicted industrial complex is no better; worse, in fact, because I have to pay for the bloated program. By taking away our need to own software individually, Google is not taking away the equivalent of our right to bear arms; it is simply exposing how little agency all of our store-bought software packages afforded us in the first place.  If all this computing-in-the-sky sounds a little too pie-in-the-sky, read ur blogger Dave Winer for a more bah humbug take on Chrome OS:  So yesterday Google announced The Chrome OS, which is hailed by the industry press as a surprise middle-of-the-night attack against their arch-rival, Microsoft. But did any of the reporters take a quiet moment to reflect on the basic question: What Just Happened? If they had, they would have been hard-pressed to find anything actually had happened, other than a press release.  Let’s be dispassionate. Before yesterday’s announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks.  However, most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it’s still true today. . . .  And that’s the hurdle Linux has, whether or not Google calls it Chrome. Normal people, given a choice, want XP. It’s also Microsoft’s problem because people aren’t wanting Vista or Windows 7 either.
The release of Google Chrome OS is seen as a direct attack on the primacy of Microsoft Windows.