A year and half from now, you may see a new choice in the computer aisle of your local electronics store: little laptops, or netbooks, with an operating system made by Google instead of Microsoft. Google just announced that it will make a personal computer operating system, to be called Chrome OS, based on the Linux operating system. (It is separate from the company’s Android cellphone operating system, which also can work on netbooks.)
The main advantage of Chrome OS is that it is free. Microsoft’s Windows 7 is reported to cost netbook makers at least $45 per computer. Even if Microsoft is forced to cut the price to the $25 level that it has been charging netbook makers for its ancient Windows XP system, a Chrome netbook may well be in stores for $30 to $50 less than an equivalent Windows machine.
Google also says that Chrome will be faster to start, easier to use and more secure than Windows. We’ll have to see about that. So far the other versions of Linux sold on netbooks have confounded users, who have largely rejected them in favor of Windows machines.
Chrome OS will be optimized for one thing: accessing the Web. But in Google’s view of the world, anything you would ever want to do — reading your e-mail, writing documents, playing games — can be done through browsers. The latest browser standard, HTML 5, has technology that allows Web sites to store information on your computer, so you can keep writing your novel even when you are on the airplane. The premise is that in a world where computers are connected to the Internet almost all the time, your computer doesn’t need to do that much.
This is how Google describes the experience it is trying to create:
People want to get to their e-mail instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.
There is a tiny little downside here: no local software. Browsers don’t yet do everything, and there are two decades of Windows applications that have been written, performing functions that can’t yet be replicated in a browser. If you want to load music onto your iPod, for example, you need a computer that runs iTunes. Web sites often require programs to run alongside the browser, like Adobe’s Acrobat viewer. Even Google writes Windows programs for its Picasa photo editing product and Google Earth 3-D mapping system.
But over time, more and more functions can be moved onto Web sites.
What do you think? Would you buy a Web-oriented computer with a Google operating system? Or is there something special about Windows and its applications for which you’d be willing to pay an extra $50?
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