Marcelo Calbucci

I think Google is one of the companies trying the hardest (and succeeding) to innovate technology. They are not afraid of making mistakes and are trying lots of different things. It helps they have AdWords to help fund all those money losing projects, but this is how Microsoft also created lots of innovation using funds from Windows and Office.

But this blog post is about the Chrome OS.

Google made a huge mistake with the Chrome OS and that is calling it an "OS". They lost an opportunity to trivialize the OS and make it into a commodity, but instead they decided they wanted to compete with other OSes and they are going to lose because of this stupid branding decision.

Let me try to elaborate a bit more. Technologists for about 50 years understand what an OS is. It's the layer between the applications and the hardware. It takes care of the files on your disk, it sends and receives data over the network, it allows processes (applications) to run and do stuff on your computer. There are dozens of OSes out there, including famous ones like Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Unix, Solaris, Symbian, and a lot of others we haven't heard much.

So, as a consumer we have a mental picture of what an OS is and by calling the Chrome OS and "OS" Google purposefully wants us to compare Windows and MacOS to "Chrome OS", except that it's the wrong comparison. You cannot write a game for Chrome OS, or write a Web Server on Chrome OS. All that you can do is execute web applications. A bit more than your typical web application, but an web application nonetheless.

What Google should have done was created a whole new industry and concept. The should have redefined what it means to run something that controls the hardware. In other words, they should have defined the real "network appliance" or "networked pc". The one that Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy talked about in the 90s. Google had enough money, brand power and smart folks to make that a reality. But they didn't.

Now they will have an uphill battle on retail stores of the world. Can you imagine your aunt going to a Best Buy and the salesperson explaining that she can't run Office or an Office-like application on that device? "But you can access Google Docs online!" and she's going to go, "huh?".

Did Amazon tried to sell Kindle as a replacement for netbooks? Not really. They created a new industry which they defined as complimentary to existing things. You have a desktop, a laptop, a netbook *and* a Kindle.

I think companies lose focus when they try too hard to destroy the competition (Microsoft) than they try to do good by their customers. That's what happened to Sun Microsystems in the late 90s and that's the path Google is taking.

I just did a fresh install of Windows 7, instead of an upgrade from Vista, which means I had to re-install all my applications. For the last two decades, I always do a fresh install and part of that is to make an inventory list of everything I'll need to install after the OS. Thanks to cloud-computing and web-based services, this list is much smaller than just a few years ago.

This post is just for myself to look back a decade from now to see what I was running locally:

• Office 2007
• Photoshop/Illustrator CS 4 (Adobe Web Premium)
• Premiere/After Effects CS 4 (Adobe Production Premium)
• SQL Server 2008
• Visual Studio 2008
• Fiddler
• GroupMail
• Twhirl
• AVG
• Live Mesh
• Messenger