Thenewnewmedia

Google's new OS announcement is all over the news. It is a really important and interesting development.Competition betweeen these 2 giants is heating up as they step into each other's territory, first MS with Bing and now Google with its own Chrome OS. The gloves are totally off (they've been half off for some time now). Google says this OS will be open source and available for developers. Seems, Open Source is becoming more and more threatening for MS and could be coming with a vengeance. As Google tries to give end users a simple OS based on a web browser it will be easier for developers to write apps for the web than for the OS, this can prove an advantage for Google as opposed to Linux that always suffered due to app abundance and compatibility.This is part of Google's push to cloud computing. If Chrome OS is a hit with users what could the future for corporate computing be like? While many believe cloud computing is the future, I personally believe that it will take a while. Besides, I don't expect MS to just sit and watch.

Google still makes 99% of their revenue from search advertisement today. They also know that with increasing competition from companies like Wolfram and Microsoft, it is very hard for them to grow the business indefinitely.

Thus, it is very natural to see that they are venturing into different markets from radio advertising to cell phone market. If one looks at the history of Microsoft, it is in a great parallel with Google. They also had a cash cow and tried to differentiate their product offerings over years. They have been somewhat successful in doing so.

With all of this in mind, I would like to ask; what is the competitive advantage of Google in entering the operating system market over Microsoft and various linux distributions in a fairly crowded market?

I question Google's decision to even enter an Operating System market with their own OS offering. We already have a bizillion flavors of Linux. Why do we need ANOTHER linux distro? I'm a Microsoft certified pro, I will defend Windows existence to the death, but lately I got bored with Windows. 7 is just a prettier cousin of Vista, who was the ugly spawn of XP. So I wanted to try something new... I despise Apple so I went with the Ubuntu version of Linux. It wasn't fancy but it was nice and I thought, much like millions of others, that Ubuntu was going to be the "IT OS" in terms of a solid, easy to use, stable Linux offering. Now, we hear that Google is going to offer their own. You can bet that it will be as good, if not better, then Ubuntu -- but much like Chrome vs. Firefox -- why do we need a *SIMILAR* offering? I would have rather preferred that Google takeover Ubuntu rather then compete with it and add ore confusion to the mix? Bad call on Google's part, in my humble opinion.