I don’t think you have to look for a suspicious strategic reason for Google to produce a product when the market they’re going into has only 1 competitor and that competitor is on fire and billowing smoke for 10 years plus. There is no PC OS that “just works”. People are buying Windows 7 PC’s and they still get 80% of XP malware and viruses and they don’t even get a modern browser! It’s a massive technical failure that should be answered by other vendors.

If all of my computing is confined to a Web browser (like 90% of us), then buying a $500 PC with Google Chrome OS instead of a $500 PC with Windows 7 offers me these legitimate technical advantages:

- PC boots in 10 seconds instead of 1:30
- no viruses or anti-virus subscription required
- no commercial malware or anti-malware subscription required
- browser is twice as fast
- browser offers 2009 level of Web technology instead of 2003
- browser is compatible with standardized (HTML5) Web apps made for iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Mac, and other computer systems instead of being compatible with IE6 Web apps which are no longer being produced
- the whole computer is “stateless”, meaning I can login to any Chrome OS device and see my Desktop, as opposed to having to login to my 1 Windows PC which is probably down with a virus
- no application installs, no library conflicts which made Windows famous
- no Windows Tax
- no proprietary Microsoft file formats which require me to use Microsoft software to work with them
- no need to authorize the operating system, no way for it to stop working because of authorization server failure
- vastly simplified interface that gets out of the way of Web content
- migrating to a new PC later involves: 1) buy new PC, 2) login to new PC, instead of for example, the 20+ hour migration from Windows XP to 7
- read-only boot partition instead of a malware-infested boot partition
- automatic security patches instead of 10,000 manual patches you can never keep track of
- new OS update very year instead of every 3-4 years

That’s just off the top of my head.

Over the past few years, Apple took 90% of the high-end PC market, and they’ll continue to have that because in the high-end market you need apps like Photoshop and Final Cut which are not coming to the Web for many, many years yet. The reason for this domination of that segment is that a high-end Dell to run Photoshop will cost the same as a Mac to run Photoshop, but the Dell gets viruses and requires much more I-T support (not to mention has no built-in color management like Mac OS).

The same thing is going to happen to the low-end PC market over the next few years. People will be faced with 2 very similar low-end PC platforms (Chrome OS and Windows 7) but the Windows 7 system will get viruses and require much more I-T support. When you throw in the wild card of an Apple tablet running iPhone OS, the low-end Windows PC market is toast.

So what’s the real motive behind this OS?
Maybe to entice people to use Google products (search engines, email, browsers).

Maybe it’s simply meant to keep would be competitors distracted by diverting resources back into their own OS development teams. Thus taking the focus away from Google’s core business of search engines and advertising.

Thoughts?