IDC analyst Al Hilwa said Chrome Operating system will take some hard selling by Google and its partners to get on netbooks, those hard disk-less machines from Asus, Dell, HP and others that let users access Web applications. He wonders if consumers and enterprises will accept only running Web applications and not local apps. Gartner analyst Ray Valdes wonders how serious potential hardware partners will be about Chrome OS. Will netbook makers use Chrome OS as a bargaining chip to get better deals on Windows operating system licenses from Microsoft?
Should Google Chrome Operating System sees the light of
day a year from now as the company expects, it will take 10 years before it
begins to see serious enterprise adoption, an analyst told eWEEK.
IDC analyst Al Hilwa said Chrome OS, which Google
officials released to open source Nov. 19, will take some hard selling by Google and its partners
to get on netbooks, essentially smaller laptops that let users access Web applications. Some of these machines don't have integrated CD-ROM drives to let users download software locally to the machine.
During a demonstration at the Chrome OS launch to open
source, Google Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai
showed how Chrome OS can boot in seven seconds, a supremely faster load than
Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X operating systems. Google is able to do
this by removing or consolidating the boot processes in Chrome OS, which seems
super lightweight.
Moreover, the notion that Google does all of the updating
in the cloud for Chrome OS netbook users without giving them the choice may be
welcomed by some consumers, but it's not something that enterprises will easily
cotton to.
"[The cloud-based updates] are not going to
eliminate problems. You'll still have occasionally an update that comes in and
it will screw up something. Enterprises don't want to see that kind of thing. I
think they're making some bets on this and it will be interesting to see how it
plays out.
He also said he was amazed that Google is releasing
Chrome OS without the ability to download local apps to the machines it runs
on. That is, Chrome OS and its Chrome browser will run only Web apps. Hilwa added:
"You wonder if netbook users are going to be okay
with that, and if they will want to store everything in the cloud. Before it's
all over, there's going to be some offline applications and then there will be
some offline usage of data. They're going to have Flash memory and people will
store data locally. There's almost no way around that."
For these reasons, Hilwa said Chrome OS will be a
consumer phenomenon for the first five years, but it will be 10 years before
Chrome OS can conceivably corral 5 percent of the enterprise computing market.
What will happen? Assuming Google Chrome OS gets that
far, some netbook makers will show interest in it to put pricing pressure on
Microsoft and will dabble in it. "The market is ready to try new things,
but it's going to be a long time before a new OS has serious share and Google
has to keep a sustained marketing push on this."
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