How Google blew the OS market wide open

MS cash cow sees cloudy future

Google's stab at Chrome operating system has had many a pundit thinking more and more about the direction of the OS market. Microsoft's Windows has been suffering heavily since Windows XP's inception. It's widely reported that it took 10,000 people and over five years to produce Vista. yet it was so badly received that Windows 7 was released just two years later.

Such are Microsoft's struggles, it's behemoth has hardly experienced change between the two versions - despite the hype, Windows 7 is Vista with a new task bar and a few bug patches.

Legacy driver and software support, a creaking registry, a near-infinite number of hardware combinations, and the necessity to provide multiple flavours of the same underlying OS to computers ranging from a netbook to a hardcore server, has meant Microsoft's releases are inevitably slow to arrive, buggy, and perform poorly next to other highly-tuned host operating systems.

Linux has seen usability increases since the inception of projects such as Ubuntu and further driver support for legacy and new devices. However, it's still struggling to make much impact on the consumer market, failing to overcome the novice user's fear of using a command line to drive their software and hardware.

This doesn't mean it doesn't have a future - Linux is highly adaptable and can be slip-streamed to provide the bare basics needed by the end-hardware used to inter-operate with the cloud. It'll also provide the underlying sever operating systems needed on the Cloud itself.

This is why Google is using an implementation of Linux under-the-hood of Chrome OS. From a Microsoft perspective this could be where we see a new use of MinWin, Microsoft's cut down kernel and OS - which allegedly already provides the underlying core components of its current operating systems.