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GoogleOS Scenarios

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the larry-and-sergey-you-have-my-email-address dept.

ReadWriteWeb writes "Read/WriteWeb offers 3 scenarios for a GoogleOS and suggests it could be less than 6 months away. They say it may be a web based desktop (aka WebOS), a full featured Linux distribution, or a lightweight Linux distro and/or BIOS. They predict that once Microsoft's Vista rolls out, it will present a direct threat to Google's Web properties and so therefore Google will start a more punchy strategy — pushing Firefox and some form of Google OS in order to nullify Vista's potential impact."

4 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. So in other words by ats-tech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "They say it may be a web based desktop (aka WebOS), a full featured Linux distribution, or a lightweight Linux distro and/or BIOS."

    They have no idea.

    1. Re:So in other words by postmortem · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Only thing they ("analysts") understand is that unless they put out baseless claims frequently, they are out of job.

    2. Re:So in other words by 14CharUsername · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think this is just a message to MS: "If you don't play nice with vista, this is what we can do..."

      I think the amount of money to be made from Desktop OS's is going to take a drop, even for MS. Piracy is going to continue to take a chunk of business no matter how much MS pushes WGA and DRM. But an even bigger problem is that most people just don't need that many features from an OS. the Office, IE, and Windows lock in schemes are being chipped away by increased competition and anti-trust rulings. Computers aren't going to keep improving geometrically forever, so people will stop replacing their computers every couple of years, and that means less bundled copies of windows being sold.

      Now these same conditions also affect Linux. I don't think a Desktop Linux distro could do much more than break even. There's money to be made on servers, but not as many people will bother paying for support for their desktop. So Google probably doesn't really want to do a Linux desktop distro, its far easier to let Mark Shuttleworth dump his time and money into it. But if Microsoft gets up to their usual dirty tricks with vista... well buying ubuntu and puting a few billion into improving it is a good strategy to prevent Google from becoming another Netscape.

  2. Arg by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What compels people that know nothing about technology to keep writing these "Google OS" articles? Do they even understand what an OS is?

    MS bought into this "web OS" hype over 5 years ago. It was stupid then, and it's stupid now.

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