Operating Systems

Google develops a lot of web applications that are free and publicly available. It also has a couple of softwares outside those web applications as well. Google launched a web browser in 2008 which called Chrome. Google Chrome has 10% market share which is impressive for a web browser that fresh. Google Chrome was a project which formed the base for the Google Operating System which is called Chrome/Chromium OS.

Chrome OS is a bit different than the other OS in the way it works. The working principle of Chrome OS is to actually have a very light software running on the computer (most probably on a laptop because that’s what’s intended) and that the data, which includes preferences as well as content, is obtained by connecting to the Google Cloud through internet. The advantage of this is that whichever computer you use, the software that you interact with is going to be the same OS that you use in your own computer. So it takes mobility into a new phase, one that you don’t have to carry any hardware with you.

The idea might seem very clever, but it is highly criticized at the moment. A lot of people are not ready to make that jump and leave all their third party application behind in their desktop. Chrome OS is intended to have a marketplace called the “Chrome Web Store” where users can download applications to use, but these applications are not intended to be big programs such as photo or music editing software, or games that require a lot of hard disk space as well as good performance. So to simply put it, what Chrome OS is attempting to do is to build a OS for only web applications. This at first might not look like a good deal, but Google seems to think that people are doing or have the opportunity to do everything on the web. This in fact is becoming very true since there are many applications on web today that people wouldn’t even imagine to one day use on web. There are photo editors, music players, slideshow builders and pretty much every application that an average user would use on their computer.

Chrome OS was announced in 2009 and is open source, meaning that anyone can make their own version. Since the release there were a lot of different variations on the web that are experimental. In December 2010 Google made a pilot program available to public, and would send out a limited amount prototype called Cr-48 to selected people.

The other OS Google “has” is Android. Though, it is not correct to say Google actually owns Android, because it actually belongs to the Open Handset Alliance which is led by Google. The Android OS is an open source software since 2008 (under an Apache License). It is currently running 2.3 Gingerbread version. Research by Gartner suggests that Android’s Q3 2010 market share is 25.5% up from 3.5% in Q3 2009. This is absolutely a huge jump. Android’s biggest competitor is perhaps the iPhone which had 16.7% market share back in Q3 2010. The reason for this success has multiple factors. First one is perhaps because it is made by Google. Google really has a way of connecting with consumers, even though they might not seem like a very consumer driven company. A lot of people already used the Google cloud when Android came out, and it was easier to sync your data in Google cloud with an Android phone, and it also offered more Google services than any other smartphone. The second biggest factor is perhaps the plentiful number of choices. There are a lot of different kind of phones that run Android, which the exact opposite of Apple’s strategy to direct all users to one product so they don’t have to choose from different confusing choices.

Google introduced the new version of Android, 3.0 Honeycomb, which is specially designed to work on tablets. 2010 was supposed to be the year of tablets, but the only major tablets that had achieved success was the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which ran a smartphone version of Android. 2011 Consumer Electronics Show seems to have a lot of new stuff in the name of tablets, especially with the detailed introduction of the Honeycomb. The flagship of the Honeycomb seems to be the new Motorola Xoom which looks pretty good, and might be the tablet that a lot of people were waiting for.