Disclaimer: This is the beginning of hopefully a series of posts by myself (a.k.a Peter Griffin) for E27 in my role as a guest author. I hope to opine about the various happenings in the tech-world and hope to generate some serious discussion around hard-hitting topics (such as who Kevin Rose is dating at the moment)

So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week or so, you must have heard about The Big G making its foray into the operating system space with the announcement that it would be launching a desktop operating system called the ‘Chrome OS’ aimed at the netbook market. The first question that popped into this author’s head is – wait a minute – netbook you say; isn’t that a glorified smartphone? And doesn’t Google already have an OS for smartphones? Ah yes, Android of course. But Google makes this clarification:

While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Okay fair enough – if one of my products is being crushed by competition, I’d rather have the competition be one of my other products, rather than something developed by my good buddies at either Cupertino or Seattle.

The Death Match

But the blogosphere and the twitterverse have been fascinated by a darker, more dangerous war – the one supposed to erupt between Microsoft and Google over who becomes the Big Daddy of your desktop. TechCrunch gave it apocalyptic connotations, while others have warned Microsoft is about to be the victim of a horrific accident of some kind.

Let’s all take a deep breath.

First of all, this is just an announcement. There’s neither been any code provided nor any firm dates as to when it will actually launch (Yes, Google mentions ‘the second half of 2010′ in its blog entry, but that is still quite vague). While it is definitely exciting to think of a challenger to Microsoft’s dominance, let’s reserve the hyperbole till after someone actually uses Google Chrome OS on an actual piece of hardware.

Alan Kay is right

The famous computer scientist once said (and Steve Jobs quoted him during the launch of the iPhone):

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

And he’s right. The reason why the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the PS3, the XBox are so successful is because the software and the hardware is controlled by the same set of people. What concerns this author about Chrome OS (and for that matter, even Android) is that however good the operating system is, if the underlying hardware is crappy, the experience is ruined.

The other reason (and I take no credit for this, Jon Gruber made this point a long time ago, and I’m merely reiterating), especially from a developer’s point of view, is that with multiple vendors, there’s no guarantee that all netbooks running Google Chrome OS have the same hardware functionality. Imagine this scenario: an iPhone developer, knows for a fact that the application that he is producing, will have access to a camera – since all iPhones have cameras. This needn’t be true for all netbooks running Google Chrome OS, or all smartphones running Android. Hence, the developer must always code for the ‘lowest-common-denominator’ which results in hard-to-maintain and inelegant code.

Ok I’ve had my NetBook fun – now can I do some real computing?

The whole argument for a web-based operating system falls on its face when someone wants to do anything outside the web. Want to watch a DVD? Sorry, please use your Windows machine. Want to edit the movie that you just recorded on your new camcorder? Sorry, I need my MacBook for that task. Want to play World of Warcraft? Case closed.

So the whole brouhaha about Chrome OS seriously competing with Microsoft Windows is a little misguided, since first of all the netbook market is minuscule (and in my opinion will remain so, as smartphones become more powerful), but more importantly, Microsoft doesn’t make its money from bundling Windows with netbook, it does so from corporate purchases and the bigger desktop/laptop market.

On the other hand

I wholeheartedly welcome Google to compete against the incumbents. Competition is good for everybody and while OS X continues to innovate at a much faster rate than Windows in the desktop and mobile space, the paradigm is still the same as it was almost 30 years ago when desktop computing was invented. What Google could do is bring a completely fresh perspective to the table, where your computer is the network and where you could program parts of your computer (such as opening and playing a movie from your DVD drive) using Javascript and web-technologies. Imagine that!

But until then, let’s all just calm down.