Why Chrome will soon lose its luster

Whether by accident or design, Google is now marketing two separate operating systems: Android and Chrome OS. The former is Google's answer to iPhone. What it lacks in originality, it attempts to make up for by being free. Android seems set to struggle, due to the lack of a consistent hardware and user interface design, which is an inevitable result of its open source roots. In a sense, Android’s greatest strength (being free) is also its greatest weakness (insufficient central control over its destiny). As a consequence, Android lacks iPhone's bountiful supply of apps, since developers must contend with disparate hardware configurations, and a lack of centralised marketing support.

Chrome OS, on the other hand, is a more interesting product - albeit, it seems equally likely to fail. Where Android is an opportunist me-too, attempting to capture some of iPhone's magic, Chrome OS is truly original, and moreover, something that lies at the heart of the Google's long term strategy. As such, whilst Android's failure would be a pity, Chrome's failure would be viewed as a disaster for the search giant. Trouble is, the disaster appears to be looming before the product has officially been released from the Googleplex.

For years, some analysts have misguidedly argued that Google was building their own operating system, citing GMail and Google Docs as the prima facie evidence. These analysts were mistaking the applications that they routinely used on Windows with the actual OS itself. But it seems that the analysts were not the only ones to fall for this particular fallacy. Some people at Google took the idea seriously too, and started cooking up plans for their own home brew "thin client".

The idea of a thin client is not new. It comes up time and again whenever enemies of Microsoft are trying to cook up plans to unseat their foe's Windows monopoly. The argument goes something like this. With the advent of the Internet, applications will increasingly move from the desktop to the cloud, and proprietary application frameworks for Windows (and indeed for Mac) will be replaced by commoditized open web interfaces.

Oracle's Larry Ellison was a notable proponent of thin clients - pushing the idea of the Network Computer as early as 1996. Others like Sun and Sony have also dabbled with the idea. What is notable, of course, is that every software vendor argues that a thin client has space for their own propriety technologies, but those of other vendors are just too heavy and cumbersome. (Much like Apple's Steve Jobs arguing that Adobe's Flash plugin is not lightweight enough for the iPhone).

While Google has a pretty good track record of promoting open standards, they have also been known to push their own proprietary special sauce, such as Google Gears. It will be interesting to see how their apps work on Chrome OS - will they be regular web apps, or will they have proprietary hooks into the OS? It's hard to believe that Google won't be tempted to differentiate the app experience for Chrome OS users with some proprietary value-add, undermining the entire web/cloud/open proposition in the process.

So, Chrome OS is nothing new, and sadly, like its forbear, Oracle's Network Computer, it is unlikely to be successful. It relies on a solid-state drive, which will make it expensive. But moreover, Google rationalises this on the basis that users will not need much local storage - everything will be stored on the cloud… despite the fact that anyone who has tried to do serious work over 3G connections will know that this is patchy at best. When challenged on the practicalities, Google falls back on to the argument that this won't be a primary computing device - people will use it as a second computer. That may be. But if it's not fit for day-to-day use, then what use is it at all?

If the lack of local storage was Chrome OS's only problem, it would be fatally flawed. But it doesn't stop there. Applications will not run locally on Chrome OS either. This essentially means that there will be only one app on Chrome OS - a web browser (which, incidentally, is based upon Apple's WebKit technology). Anything that you want to do with your shiny new Chrome OS powered toy will have to take place within the browser. That may be fine for surfing the web and (at a push) reading your e-mails, but it's hardly adequate for watching videos and playing 3D games. Google would say - well that's not what a Chrome OS device is for. But that's just not good enough. Apple made a similar argument when they first launched the iPhone, but they would hardly claim today that the apps are not important. It turns out people do want to play 3D games after all. Does Google really believe that the same would not be true of a Chrome OS powered net book?

Chrome OS is, sadly, another example of a big corporate starting to believe their own hype, and losing track of reality in the process. Since Google doesn't really expect to make any money out of their open source dabbling, the failure of Chrome OS is hardly going to impact their bottom line. But for the analysts who initiated this particular game of emperor's new clothes, it will doubtless seem like a major disaster.