Follow up to my post yesterday about the Google Chrome OS. First off, read the excellent Fake Steve Jobs post about the new OS and we agree on most points - he just presents in a much funnier, insightful, and entertaining manner.
Second, the rumblings are that Eric Schmidt needs to leave Apple's board because of potential competitive issues. He currently recuses himself from board meetings that deal with the iPhone due to Google competing Android product. Will he now recuse himself when there is talk of Mac OS? So pretty much he's just there to discuss iPods? Seems like a waste of space in my opinion. However, my prediction is that Schmidt does not leave Apple's board. This leads me to believe that the Google Chrome OS is not really going to be an OS in the traditional sense of the word which means it doesn't really compete with Mac OS and for that matter, Windows. Let's remember, it's basically Linux with the Chrome browser bolted on top. The real point of the Chrome OS is to push more Chrome installations and not to beat Windows. Believe me, it takes more than just having a superior OS to take significant market share away from Microsoft. Look at Mac OS and the ahead of its time BeOS. Both were better operating systems yet couldn't even make a dent in Windows. I hardly doubt ANOTHER Linux variant is going to fair any better.
Posts for Tag: windows
The Google OS - It's big news, but not really that big
via techcrunch.com
I picked this post up from TechCrunch and though it definitely is a major step forward, let's not make it more than what it really is. Google Chrome, in its proposed incarnation, will never replace Windows (or Mac OS) as a legitimate desktop OS; just like Linux never replaced Windows as a consumer desktop OS. The web has become a major APPLICATION that we all use on a daily basis but there are many other applications that we use that don't require us to connect online. And before anyone starts talking about ZOHO or Google Apps, has anyone really tried using any of these online office applications? Frankly, they're not that useful beyond the bare basics of what a spreadsheet or word processing application should do. Can they get better, of course. Just not today or in my opinion the foreseeable future (next 1-3 years).
But lest I seem like I am in Microsoft's corner, this is a significant announcement. The real point is not for Google to overtake Microsoft in the OS world. It just needs to make a dent and I think it will. Microsoft's empire is one based on total domination. If it ceased to own more than the roughly 90% of the OS market it does today, that will be a major hit to its bottom line. Microsoft is a bloated organization with lots of people making lots of money (roughly 91K+). If Google was able to either take 5%-10% market share OR force Microsoft to significantly lower the price of a Windows license, it could make things difficult for them. In the end, that's all Google is aiming for. Make life difficult for Microsoft in its core product (desktop) so it doesn't concentrate on Google's core product (web).
Apple releases upgrades to laptops and lower prices
And yet more Apple news...
At today's WWDC, Apple announced upgrades to the MacBook line. The Aluminum 13" MacBook will be now considered a MacBook Pro (the white plastic MacBook is the only version in the MacBook line, now) and will have a bump in processor power, hard drive space, and a slightly better screen resolution. Other goodies include SD card slot and FireWire 800 port. There were also upgrades to the 15" and 17" MacBook Pros and also the MacBook Air (won't list them here but you can check them out on the Apple website).
The bigger news is that prices were reduced anywhere from $100 to $700 across the line. Still doesn't make them on par with Windows based laptops but at least they're making an effort to be more affordable. I'll probably pick up a new 13" MacBook Pro in a few months and pass my current MacBook on to the wife. By then, there should be enough froth in the secondary market to snag one at slightly below retail and with no sales tax.
Stronger ... Faster ... Smaller? An OS upgrade that's smaller than its predecessor
It's a big Apple news day...
Having been a Windows user for the majority of my computing life, I've been trained to expect every subsequent new version of Windows to be larger than the version it succeeds. I made the switch to Mac a little over a year ago and kinda had the same expectation of the new OS 10.6 release. Stronger, faster, but maybe a little more bloated which I don't have an issue with given that hard drive prices continually get pushed down. However, I come to find that when upgrading to the new Mac OS build, you actually free up 6GB of space. That's definitely a refreshing revelation.
It made me think of a tech documentary (one of the best, in my opinion) called Triumph of the Nerds on PBS. One particular line was from Steve Ballmer who was describing how in the early days of Microsoft, they were bucking the trend of building big bloated software. Here's the quote:
"In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 50K-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing."
The really ironic part is that Microsoft doesn't seem to invest money in actually making its OS more streamlined. Windows just seems to get bigger and bigger. Given all the advances in coding and technology, why can't someone make an OS more powerful yet slimmer? The short answer is that they never had to. CPUs got more powerful and memory (hard drives, RAM) got bigger/cheaper. Still, it's nice to see that someone actually decided to take a step back and say, "Hey, I can make this software perform better AND reduce its overall size."
Older
Newer