Why you can safely ignore Google ChromeOS

Over on ZDNet I wrote a long piece about why all the hubris about Google ChromeOS makes little or no sense. As an example of the more extreme things written today, check this from Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of TechCrunch:

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.

That might sound like a great idea but remember we’re over a YEAR before Google will have anything to show and it will be a version 1.0.

The piece I wrote said – among other things:

Yes – I see the need for an OS designed specifically for the Internet but would you trust Google to get it right? As I and others have said before, Google may be good at getting product out the door but it is not so great at delivering a polished product. Despite Arrington’s crowing, I defy any enterprise buyer to seriously consider dumping Excel in favor of Google Docs and Spreadsheet. Even taking the beta label off the product doesn’t help. If anything it serves to highlight Google’s deficiencies. The spreadsheet is missing critical functionality like Pivot Table handling to which every finance person I know is addicted. In addition, I note that most of the customers Google rolls out to tell its apps story are focusing their thoughts on GMail.

The more critical problem is that much of what was said was based on little more than a press release. That cannot be right. There was almost no research to back up claims such as: Google Drops a Bomb: Its Own Operating System and Google to challenge Microsoft with Chrome OS.

Fortunately a few have more sense. Om Malik for instance says:

I spent a big part of the morning reading many different stories and posts — and they say absolutely nothing, apart from chunks of information from the original blog post, which is, well, a lot of words that say nothing much.

In our own back yard, Charles Arthur of The Guardian adds fuel to this nonsensical story by saying:

It is the technology industry’s equivalent of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Google, the web upstart founded 11 years ago, has announced it will go head-to-head with Microsoft with an operating system (OS) – the programs that make a computer work – for machines ranging from handhelds up to desktop computers.

What Charles and almost everyone else has failed to understand is that operating systems are not the simple things that boot machines up but are the foundation upon which many applications are built. There is a reason why Microsoft has an extensive and much loved certification program for engineers who wish to develop for its platform.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m a huge saas fan and a huge lover of innovation but this story, which has been blown up out of all proportion worries me. When the so-called informed press start making it up as they go along with little regard for reality on the ground then you know we’re in for a deluge of confusing and poorly informed stories that can easily suck people into believing what will almost certainly turn out to be nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong – Microsoft is not without fault but in the real world it is the dominant player across almost every category you can think of. Expecting Google to upend it through open source developers may come to pass. But I doubt it will be in my lifetime.

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Tagged as: Google Chrome, Microsoft