Will Google Chrome challenge Windows?

Nice to see that editorial freedoms are being preserved at Techcrunch. Their iPhone fanboi thing get a bit much sometimes, but this is encouraging.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/08/why-we-need-to-chill-about-chromeos/

"ChromeOS can’t beat anything. In fact suggesting that ChromeOS will beat Windows or even OS X is like expecting Coby to come up behind Sony and Samsung next year in Blu-Ray player popularity. As a wise man once said “Ain’t the same ** ballpark. It ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same ** sport.”

ChromeOS is a specialized version of Linux designed for netbooks. It is more like Android than anything else and, as Fake Steve notes, no one will use it. Oh, manufacturers will pay lip service to it and maybe someone will install it on a few million machines but it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the powerful web OSes called Windows 7 and OS X.

And he’s absolutely right. Anyone can make a Linux install disk, call it “Super Google Linux” and rock out. There even was a Google OS - albeit an unofficial one - called gOS. And we all saw how well that went. Hell, you can even make Hanna Montana Linux for newbies but that doesn’t mean newbies will install it or manufacturers will use it. There’s no reason.

 

If all I had to work with was Google Docs I'd go nuts. The text editor is a real loser, the spreadsheet is well... it works but it doesn't do all that much... Win7 is said to bring Windows on a par with Apple OS and it's modular and configurable for running how it's needed to run... I even like Bing better than Google search as of the last few days. The new photo of the day is always incredible. Google is a company that does not understand aesthetics to say the least, the are sort of a web 1997 on steroids...

 

I wish there were real competition for the desktop OS. . . . I think. On one hand, we'd get better OSes for less, but on the other the apps would be more expensive and not as good.

I guess what I'd really like to see is a real threat to Windows. Something that makes Balmer and the rest of the MSFT execs get up in the middle of the night and knock back a slug of Maalox every once in a while. Or even (quickly) becomes the dominate OS, and MSFT is now the threat that keeps the new guys on their toes.

But this isn't it, sad to say.

 

by the way, which genius moved this into 'trading software? What the hell does this have to do with trading software?? The question is, is MSFT a long term short because of this news?

 

You weren't able to connect the dots so let me help you out.

This thread is about Chrome challenging Windows. Chrome was first released in beta almost a year ago and has barely gained any usage among browsers (1.8%)... Windows is far more entrenched as an OS and will be even tougher competition.

P.S. your argument about the horse & carriage versus the automobile is specious because Chrome is not a radical leap in technology. The automobile was.