ChromeOS: Great for Technology, Not the Second Coming.

I like Valleywag. Like a lot of geeks, I love to pop it open and read about what stupid hijinks are going on in technology. The ubiquitous Silicon Valley gossip rag serves as a frankly horrifying combination of Wired, the now-defunct Fuckedcompany.com, the Weekly World News, and Playboy. Scathing, scandalous, and often sexual, Valleywag is one of those things you talk about in hushed conversation over a glass of wine at a dimly-lit bar in Palo Alto or yell about over some loud house music while holding a Stella at a party in San Jose. Valleywag is all about the ‘Valley’s fairyland image of geek money, sex, and power.  And we, the people living in the much more muted version of its stories, eat it up.

Suffice to say, Valleywag is not exactly the place where I expect to read an article about how intangible hype is a problem. But sure enough, Valleywag joined with a few dissenters in trying to de-hype the news that Google’s announcement of a Chrome-based OS for netbooks. They’re definitely in the minority though. Everyone from the New York Times to Reuters is throwing up their hands screaming about how this means Google will come seriously challenge Windows in the desktop space. Clearly, a battle of the titans will ensue! The skies are going to rain blood, lightning and thunder will clash, and statisticians from Baysian and Frequentist schools will meet in the street to fight each other with swords and whips.

I want to echo the sentiment that Valleywag had in their review of the ChromeOS news: there will be no battle of the titans. There will be no dramatic upset in the OS market. Google’s OS will undoubtedly help mold positive technological gains in Linux and technology in general, but it – at least right now – is not the game changer that people like the AP and Reuters would have you believe.

First, ChromeOS isn’t radically new. It’s effectively a few patches and a new window manager (a modified look and feel) for some distribution of Linux. This isn’t a bad thing by any means. But it doesn’t mean that Google has found the technological one-up on either Microsoft or Apple. There is some exciting stuff there though. If GoogleOS uses Chrome’s multithreaded approach to tab-launching for applications, this might mean that dual core Intel Atoms and dual core AMD Neos will yield more power to an already performance-slick Linux platform. Still, there’s a lot of serious engineering problems with this (intelligent thread arbitration, dealing with only 2 physical cores but multithreading n-systems, etc.) Also this isn’t something that Windows 7 or OSX couldn’t address, much less subsequent operating systems like the mythical “Midori” thin-client that Microsoft may or may not be working on. This gain may not yield Google an insurmountable comparative advantage. But, it may make everyone step up their game. The consumer wins.

There’s another reason why Google’s decision to jump into the ring won’t dethrone Redmond or Cupertino: it’s too small a maneuver. The netbook market is definitely booming, but it’s still too small to hit Microsoft or Apple (who isn’t even participating in netbooks) seriously in the pocketbooks if Google swept share. Microsoft makes a killing in OEM deals, sure. But it’s not its primary source of income and netbook sales don’t dominate Microsoft’s OEM income. Windows is a diverse platform that ranges across variety of PC markets, with netbooks occupying an important but small percentage. Losing this battle does not equate to losing the war.

It will scare the hell out of both of the giants though. Both Balmer and Jobs realize that consumer preferences are changing. That’s why Apple’s prices are dropping and Windows 7 is optimized for solid-state media and netbooks in general. These changes are extremely good for consumers. We’re going to get products that match what we want, and everyone’s going to be working hard for it.

It’s also great for Linux. While I don’t think that Linux is completely technologically superior to Windows or OSX, I do think that Linux’s benefits are substantial. Linux is losing the war in the consumer space because of brand; Apple and Microsoft are well known. Why use Linux, an unknown and untrusted third party for mission-critical kinds of stuff? Google will help Linux’s branding and make it a bigger threat to the OS incumbents, who now have to compete with someone technologically as opposed to just through advertisement and whisper campaigns.

Google’s decision is definitely a change in the winds for operating system superiority. It may not change the game as much as everyone’s hyping it up to be, but it is exciting.

The best news, though? No matter how this changes the market for operating systems, the consumer will win at the end of the day.