What Google Chrome OS really means

All focus is currently on Google Chrome OS and what it will mean for our beloved NetBooks. I somehow have the feeling people are not thinking far enough because our geeky NetBooks are totally irrelevant.

Google does stuff with very much focus, a lot more focus than often is visible on first sight. You can actually always think back to a) making all content available and b) more people online means more ads to display.

And there are a lot of different implementations of Google Chrome OS that will further those goals. First of all you can obviously tell people to attach their digital cameras and pictures and videos are automatically uploaded to Youtube and Picasa, but that is the braindead move.

Remember that they are building very clear hardware specifications allowing them to say that the system is rock solid if the specs are used. The important part here is x86 or ARM and solid state drives. In summary, that means a good CPU that can also render diverse video streams in high quality as well as a totally silent drive that is cheap in small sizes and only holds the OS. The OS itself will be rock solid as there is really nothing much installed.

This as such is the perfect implementation for TVs! Just imagine having your TV and being able to turn on Chrome OS to read your mail, look at youtube, search the web, automatically upload your photos, and so on. That in a silent system that boots as quickly as your TV turns on, or almost. It doesn’t need to be running at all time then which saves energy and Google is suddenly in all living rooms. Hell the OS is free or even better than free with Google paying the TV company for ads served to the user. The TVs have network interfaces already anyway.

The other thing is that there are LARGE groups of people in developing countries that might not have the money for a full blown PC and Google could potentially make this thing very cheap and possibly even free together with a data provider. They would get millions of new users that are available to their advertisers that are probably really begging for more users to advertise to in these countries.

I am really looking forward to seeing where they are going with this. Because I will keep my Mac, no questions there, but in my TV … sure … in my car … of course. Imaging this being the one laptop per Child system. Things get interesting when thinking further than normal Netbooks.