Google has said today that Chrome OS will be installed on netbooks, to be launched in the UK next month, in a move that sees Google attempting to dent Microsoft's dominance in the PC operating system market.
Google has been developing its operating system for PCs for the past two years and has now announced that the first Chromebook units – made by Samsung and Acer – will be launched in the UK, as well as the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain on 15 June.
Samsung's offering is a 12.1in notebook starting at $429 (£264), while Acer's is an 11.6in notebook, priced from $349, with optional hardware upgrades.
Google claims that Chromebooks will be an enticing prospect to enterprises because of their low price and the speed of the operating system. It said that Chromebook devices can boot and allow users to begin browsing "within seconds".
Google will also release automatic updates to the software every six weeks, claiming the OS will become faster and more sophisticated over time.
The firm also announced Chromebooks for Business and Education – a pay-monthly service that will lease Chromebooks and a cloud management console to remotely administer and manage users, devices, applications and policies. The service will also include enterprise-level support, device warranties and replacements, as well as regular hardware refreshes.
Google said that monthly subscriptions will start at $28 (£17) per user for businesses and $20/user for schools.
The Chromebook is hogging a bit of limelight in the technology world but is this all a fad?
This product is innovative but not the Windows killer. Is this a consumer product or an enterprise product? The level of internet penetration is abysmal in countries where the devices like the OLPC made headways is so poor, that the mythological “always on” connectivity to the internet, is virtually non-existent making the device absolutely impossible to use in such terrains. In geographies where we do have the “always on” connectivity to the internet, are we ready to let go of our data and store them all in the “cloud? I think the answer is a categorical “No”. Penetrating the enterprise market will be so challenging and price point is not reflective of a cheap product. Although, the product is also available at a monthly rental cost, the lack of offline capabilities for the currently supported applications will render the device useless when disconnected from the internet. What would happen if you had to travel to locales with patchy internet connection? Obviously, you still need your laptop or the now forgotten netbooks.
Enterprises are Windows centric, and so are the applications. Most enterprise applications have been designed to run on Windows platform and having a “good product” only is not sufficient to attract the masses to this product. Remember the “Betamax” and “VHS” battle of old. And in recent times, remember Apple and the App Store, against the rest. People and enterprises require computers, laptops etc. because of the applications, not the other way round.
Data theft, immature model of the cloud (remember the recent outage in Amazon EC2 and previous outages of the Gmail / Google Apps service), identity theft, SLAs, service availability etc. are concerns Google needs to address.
How I wish there could be a server component perhaps branded as “Google Server” for enterprises that may be interested in having a “Private Cloud” or “Hybrid Cloud” which will be a replica of Google Apps, but locally hosted. At least that will take away the concern around information security.
http://femiakinsola.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/google-chromebook-beyond-the-hype/
Posted by: Femi Akinsola 13 May 2011
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