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Would Google's Chrome OS tread on other OS makers toes? |
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Change is a hard thing to comprehend, even harder to live with. For a generation of computer users that grew up on the DOS command line, the arrival of Windows spelled chaos and confusion till such time that they made peace with it and then finally, adopted it. Now, Google's Chrome browser is on the horizon, once again threatening to change the way things are done. What will happen now?  The new paradigm of computing for users could well be a shift in focus from how they do things to what they need done. Take the creation of documents for example. A fresh graduate creates a resume via Microsoft Word. A recruiter may prefer to use OpenOffice to view that document, while a hiring company may store that document online through Google Docs. What is important here? The platform used to write / read / store the resume, or what the resume does for each of these parties who use it? Its all just a different way of thinking, really. Microsoft's paradigm still hinges in the core belief of installing software on people's computers to let them accomplish usual tasks – computing, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, gaming, email, going online, storing files, etc. Google's paradigm, on the other hand, takes making computers work for granted, and then deals with the more important part of what users do with their computers. Simply put, it transports a user into a cloud environment where everything exists and is administered centrally and the user does everything that Microsoft installs software for but at the fraction of the cost. The user is then free to work or play and leave the mechanics of keeping things going to Google. How the human race subscribes to this will see a redefinition of the market – specially for Microsoft, which has been top dog for almost a generation or more. Individuals, most likely, would move the fastest to the Cloud with Google's Chrome OS as they have the smallest and most fragmented workloads and the smallest quantum of personally-important data that is usually measurable in gigabytes and can easily be stored in the Cloud. Truly, they're more at risk keeping data themselves on hardware that can either malfunction, be lost, or worse, be compromised as usually happens during a hard drive crash or a malware or virus attack. Moreover, being able to access their data from the office computer, home computer, laptop, netbook or mobile phone makes it a very attractive proposition. Small and mid-size organizations too may see value in moving to the cloud. Besides assuring basic security and service levels, small businesses will also find adopting the cloud approach both convenient and economical. They would neither have to undertake administration of their IT infrastructures, nor would they have to buy expensive software to get things done. For critical tasks that cannot move to the cloud, they could move to a hybrid model by using high-performance paid software for specialized tasks and using the Cloud for everything else, such as documentation, communication and storage. These two categories of early adopters would most definitely secure a solid niche for Google's Chrome OS. Larger organizations and corporations may represent a challenge, and the real battlefield with Microsoft. As organizational change is slow, very slow actually, large corporate behemoths will, at the very least, have issues such as security, training, hiring, and compliance to contend with. Thereafter, they would have to deal with their in-house and outsourced armies of system administrators and tech-staff who form large IT divisions to keep their organizations running against a scenario where they increasingly become redundant and start losing jobs as the organization moves to the Cloud. An even bigger adjustment, and one that probably holds the key to the eventual corporate success or failure of the Cloud, would be overcoming security concerns that have their roots in very real concerns about placing business critical, proprietary, and/or secret data in a Cloud environment administered by an external entity. Is it yet possible to comprehend the dilemma of, say, a financial services company that hosts the data of even a few hundred customers in an environment where system updates happen automatically? What if there were to be an “oops!” scenario, ever? Quite clearly, the internal politics of these companies, played out against the backdrop of the waves of change washing over their business and their organizational structures, will decide the eventual victor in the battle between Google's and Microsoft's paradigms. Nevertheless, the market would, at least in the short and medium term, be characterized by four distinct niches – Microsoft's, Google's, Open source or Linux, and Apple. Which of them evolves as David, and which morphs into Goliath, remains to be seen. |
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