Eric Schmidt, Google's New OS And My Mom

On the same day that Google announced the Chrome OS, my mother announced that she was no longer going to take the paper version of the of Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, forgoing a 75 year tradition for the online version, which she admits is not all together satisfying.But the continued increase in price and decreased size and quality of the paper, not to mention the seven mile drive each day to get it left her concluding that the online experience was good enough. She already follows her beloved Packers online, corresponds daily with family and friends, and does a good bit of online shopping -- this all with a dial-up connection. Broadband service has yet to find her corner of Northern Wisconsin. So when Google talked in its announcement about developing an operating system for those who spend most of their time on the Web, it dawned on me that Google is probably far more interested in my mother than they are in business users like me.

And what an opening Microsoft has provided. The list of obscenities that Redmond has foisted on the end user community is too long to list here, but a good one would start with multi-minute boot times, a memory footprint measured in gigabytes, an operating system cost that now rivals hardware costs, and a fairly complete inability to stem the scourge of malware. These are the sorts of things that monopolies care very little about until credible competitors enter the scene threatening to take a good bit of market share.

That term 'credible competitor' is a loaded one here. Why wasn't IBM credible with OS/2, or why isn't Red Hat or Ubuntu or even Apple credible with their offerings?

While corporate size and reach are part of the equation, at least as important is an eye for the "silver bullet" (silver haired?) usage model. Apple is still too focused on graphical power users, Red Hat and the Ubuntu crowd clearly aren't thinking about my mom either. As well as they've done on improving ease of installation, there still needs to be a power user around somewhere.

Google's other advantage is that it's not reliant on an income stream of many hundreds of dollars per system. Netbook buyers are currently scratching their heads about Redmond's insistence that if they buy a new netbook now, they'll have to pay an upgrade fee to get Windows7 for it at a later date.

Users don't want Vista and Microsoft doesn't want them to have XP, so its charging more to get its way. Viable alternatives seem a good bit more viable when vendors use this sort of pained logic with customers.

We've long talked about the consumer effect and how it's driving a very different adoption model for technology in business. That once-perfect marriage of Windows, Office, and Exchange that made Microsoft the biggest software house in the world is clearly giving way to a different dynamic -- one it clearly doesn't understand -- as Vista demonstrated.

Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, has believed in the model since he introduced Network terminals in his days at Sun in the mid 1990s. Then he lacked anything sufficiently interesting on the back end for those dumb terminals to connect to. Now with Google, YouTube, and the rest of the Internet, he may have the formula exactly right.

For my money, when my mom and Eric Schmidt come to roughly the same conclusion at the same time, they're probably on to something.