San Francisco- It's the ultimate showdown in the technology
world, the clash of giants that has been eagerly awaited for years.
Web giant Google is taking its clearest aim yet at Microsoft with
its plan to produce its own operating system that would optimize the
way computers work on the internet.
The Chrome operating system is due out in the second half of next
year and will initially be used in netbooks, company executives
Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson said in a blog posting. The operating
system would be released as free, open-source software, which would
allow anyone to use or modify it.
At the core of Google's vision is the most important trend in the
networked world: the move from running applications on a desktop
computer to running them through a web browser.
From Gmail to Facebook and Picassa to Twitter, the most popular
uses for computers are no longer the disc-churning software
programmes like Microsoft Office, which have clogged up hard drives
for years. The new paradigm is cloud-based computing, where all the
heavy lifting and storage is done on companies' server farms, which
people access over their broadband connections.
According to Google, it's time that computers reflected the
change.
'The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an
era where there was no web,' Google executives Sundar Pichai and
Linus Upson wrote in a blog posting announcing the move.
The Chrome operating system is Google's 'attempt to re-think what
operating systems should be,' based on three key attributes: 'speed,
simplicity and security.'
'We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up
and get you onto the web in a few seconds. We are completely
redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that
users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.
It should just work.'
That vision sounds like digital heaven for computer users who have
wrestled forever with bloated software and computers that
progressively get slower and slower.
'People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time
waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They
want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought
them,' the Google blog said.
'They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are
and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to
back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours
configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware
or have to worry about constant software updates.'
As enticing as that prospect may seem, it's not guaranteed to
work, says Don Retallack, vice president of research at Directions on
Microsoft - a company that tracks the software giant.
'Google may or may not have the experience and capability of
actually producing an operating system and getting it deployed,' he
said. 'It may not realize how hard it is.'
Microsoft still sells between 80 and 90 per cent of PC operating
systems and is convinced that users, especially businesses, still
want their data and programmes to be stored locally, Retallack said.
'People want their information under their own control,' he says.
'I think it's going to be harder than people think.'
For example, users who opt for a Chrome-powered PC will have to
give up their old software, and may find much of their data
impossible to transfer. For computer-game players, video editors or
any other users who need raw computing power, Chrome might be
significantly underpowered.
Still, the influential blog Techcrunch called Google's move a
'genius play.'
'Microsoft has a very serious competitive threat to the core of
their revenues,' said site founder Michael Arrington. 'Every Chrome
computer bought won't have Windows and won't have Office. That must
send chills down the spine of the guys up in Redmond.'
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