Digital Media Buzz > OS Wars: Google vs. Goliath

OS Wars: Google vs. Goliath

Next Page « 1 2 »

Google’s present
The timing of the Google OS announcement was propitious for Rob Heittman, CTO of Solertium, a Williamsburg, Va., software developer that specializes in new and emerging technologies, open source projects, Google APIs and Linux and OS X platforms. Before the Chrome announcement, Heittman’s company was developing a hospitality application based around a browser-based interface and had run a test with Google’s Android OS. “We were thinking,” he says, “‘Gosh, we’d love to use Android. But it’s not going to work for us. The stuff they’re doing with Native Client and Chrome — if we could lay this on top of Linux and make an OS out of Chrome and Linux, this would be perfect.’”

When the announcement came, says Heittman, “It ended up being a perfect announcement for us for this embedded platform for point-of-sale. It’s exactly what we need. What’s nice about Chrome is that it natively speaks cross-platform. One of the limitations of thin Linux, Linux on the desktop and Linux in kiosks is that the browser portion of the OS and the desktop metaphor with the OS has been weak.”

What does this spell for native software? Is there anything that will still need the desktop environment? “What the combination of Chrome and Native Client promises,” Heittman says, “is the ability to put into the browser paradigm those things that traditionally could only have been done at the operating system level. If Google wraps this up in a nice, tidy little package, then the answer is, ‘No. There’s nothing you have to do on the desktop any more.’ I see the Chrome OS as being the full-scale desktop operating system that has the power and capabilities to go to toe-to-toe with OSX and Windows. The Chrome OS will have the guts of Linux and the head of the Chrome browser.”

Though Heittman is a long-time open-source veteran he believes that the idea of commercial open source has been very poorly evangelized. The commercial open-source universe is not ruled solely by wild-eyed libertarians like Richard Stallman. “Software where the source is open and not hidden tends to be better software,” Heittman says. “You can download the code, you can look at it, you can do whatever you want — this is the case with Google Toolkit. However, I can’t decide to go make changes to Google Toolkit’s official distribution. They’re controlling the destiny of that product and they’re supporting it. We’re betting on the horse of open source and web-based and cloud-based systems. I hope for my retirement that’s the right bet.”

When Google made the Chrome OS announcement, Jeff Haynie wrote in his blog: “It’s a great time to be a web developer.” Haynie is CEO and co-founder of Appcelerator, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of tools that enable software companies to create cross-platform mobile, web and desktop applications. He sees the Google announcement as a victory for the way the web is going. “Javascript is becoming the assembly language of the web,” he says. “Now we have gone beyond building what used to be browser-based UIs and are developing full-blown mobile applications using web technology.”

But he doesn’t see the introduction of the Chrome OS as the first round in an earth-shaking smackdown between Microsoft and Google. “We romanticize a Google versus Microsoft fight,” he says. “And we give Google a free pass. But we’re still largely a Microsoft world, even with the penetration of Linux. I don’t believe the browser as we know it today is going to be the window of the future. We need native applications that leverage native functionality and that can leverage the web engine from a development and rendering standpoint. But we really need native engaged applications. You’re seeing the same thing with the desktop; you’re seeing the same thing with Android. They will still be facilitated through native-type experience and an appropriate interface for the activity the user is engaged in.”

Although he predicts a more limited impact for the Chrome OS and web applications than some of his peers, Haynie does sense the excitement in the air that the Google announcement generated. “It feels like 1996 or 1997 all over again,” he says. “It feels like the promise we had back then, at least at the macro level, is finally being realized. Now that we’re on this next-gen innovation cycle, it’s just going to be mind-boggling.”

Next Page « 1 2 »