Chrome OS is an opportunity for Microsoft

Google's announcement of Chrome OS today - with precious little detail is still interesting. While the proof of whether Chrome OS will have a significant impact on the market long term will have to wait for key details of what a full implementation of Chrome OS, together with supporting applications and business models consists of it won't be a small undertaking. A complete consumer OS today needs to have

• An email client that supports POP and IMAP clients - Exchange support would be nice too
• Audio player
• Video player
• Word processing application
• Spreadsheet
• Photo management
• Contact management
• Calendar

All these need to work offline - while it's clearly possible to build these using web technologies making all these web technologies work seamlessly offline is harder - and the competition is a very mature, offline operating system.

The other critical question is - what is the business model for device manufacturers - even if these components are open any full OS has patent infringement risks, these risks need to be bourne by someone - whether the device manufacturer, or the supplier of the components. Google may even be more creative - and offer device manufacturers a revenue share of advertising traffic that comes from Chrome OS devices. Mobile phone operators are very comfortable with subsidising mobile handsets that generate voice revenue - why not web devices that generate advertising revenue?

All of this represents a challenge to Microsoft's operating system and Office revenues on the desktop - so how might this be a challenge?

Microsoft's strengths lie in creating great desktop applications, and they have the tools, skills, engineers and ecosystem to continue to do this. As Google embraces the desktop with Chrome OS their core skills in creating great, scalable server software don't provide as big a strategic advantage as before.

If Microsoft take their traditional approach of "embrace, and extend" - and provide a great HTML5 runtime in IE8, and great HTML5 developer tools to .NET developers - then add some .NET extensions to IE8 (and, being creative people add .NET extensions as downloadable plugins for other browsers) then Microsoft can take advantage of their traditional base of desktop developers, and focus on creating great productivity applications.

Microsoft Office Online, offline running on Chrome OS maybe?

Comments

[Rog]

Matt, nice list of requirements for an OS. I can't think of one that Google don't have.

* An email client - gMail and Wave
* Audio player - You Tube
* Video player - You Tube
* Word processing application - Goggle Docs
* Spreadsheet - Goggle Docs
* Photo management - Picasa
* Contact management - gMail
* Calendar - Goggle docs

You missed web browser, presentation package both of which Google already have.

I'm pretty certain that Google have been adding gears support to the web sites of the native entries in this list. You Tube is the only one that would give me pause for thought.

[Matt]

I agree - Google have many of the pieces - and on the media player front it will be interesting to see the approach Google take given the failure to agree codecs in the W3C HTML5 standard. As I understand it Google were in the H.264 camp - now given that Google uses Flash for YouTube I see two practicable possibilities:

Google and Apple do HTML5 with H.264 as the video piece and webkit and establish a defacto standard.

Google and Adobe combine Flash and HTML5 and AIR and ChromeOS as a runtime to compete with Microsoft - leveraging the 100m+ AIR installed base to displace Microsoft on Windows.

Either would be interesting - both is possible too!

Matt

[Deena]

6nAB9b Wish I could come up with posts that cool.