In his article “Five Reasons Google Chrome OS Will Fail”, David Coursey argues that Microsoft is simply too powerful in the OS market for any new OS to succeed. His collegue, Jared Newman, argues in “Five Reasons Google Chrome OS Will Succeed” that Google is so well-known and well-loved that it will surely succeed, and will help (if not cause) a market shift, moving a large part of the PC-owning population to Netbooks. Neither of them look at what Google promises with Google Chrome OS:

  • speed

  • reliability

  • low-cost

None of these are good enough reasons to move to a different OS, for most of us: most of us do not work on the web on a day-to-day basis. I know you are probably currently on the web (how else would you be reading my blog) as am I (how else would I be writing it - actually, any number of ways, but that’s beside the point). Desktop systems are used all around the world for a large number of things, including, but certainly not limited to web browsing and using on-line applications.

Does that mean that Google is missing the boat? I don’t think so. I’m assuming that they know that most people (probably including themselves) don’t work on the web all the time. I, for one, am perhaps on-line most of the time, but am certainly not using a web browser most of the time. I would assume, therefore, that even if the OS doesn’t come with a developers toolkit and word processor pre-installed, that doesn’t mean they can’t be installed. Hopefully, X (either Xorg or XFree) will run on Google Chrome OS, which means so will by far most applications based on gtk or Qt

I agree with most of the premises Google bases Chrome on - which is probably why I use it if I can: the web browser should stay out of the way as much as possible, have as little of a GUI as possible, and be as fast and secure as possible. Chrome (the browser), however, doesn’t lack any features that a browser needs (except perhaps a good Java plugin). I’m assuming that the Google Chrome OS won’t lack any necessities either - but I might be assuming too much.