The media is painting it as a wrestling
match between giants: Google vs. Microsoft. Operating system king Microsoft recently introduced a new Bing! browser, followed last night by search engine titan Google's announcement that it's working on an operating system for netbooks.
As usual, the mass media have somewhat missed the mark. What's actually happening is the whole landscape of computing is changing, and a race is on to see who's going to plant their flag on the new territory first.
The change in computing is the steady migration of computer technology from a thick client model to a thin client model for most routine computing needs. If you haven't yet heard about this, yet, let me explain:
Thick Clients are powerful stand-alone computers with network access. To do something useful, you download the file you want to do it to from a server; do it; then upload the file to the server again, keeping (or not) a copy of the updated file on your local computer.
Thin Clients are computers with powerful communications and display capabilities, but which are otherwise pretty anemic by conventional computer-performance standards. To do something useful, you visit an extremely powerful server, which is actually a supercomputer based on cloud-computing architecture (see "Computing With Your Head in the Clouds"). This server creates a virtual computer (See "Virtualization flies under the mass-media radar") with enough resources to run an application program (which it preloads onto the virtual computer) to do whatever it is you want to do with the file (which is stored somewhere in the computing cloud). When you're done doing your thing, the server updates the file and dissolves the virtual computer into - nothing.
Thin clients have been around for a long time. The old time-shared computer terminals we used in the 1970s to access minicomputers were very much like today's thin clients, which you know as netbooks.
The term was coined in the
early 1990s by Tim Negris, VP of Server Marketing at Oracle Corp.
The technology has been growing in popularity
and usefulness ever since. Expect in the future (probably less than 5
years) that this style of computing will be almost universal, with
everything from mobile devices to home entertainment centers
architected as thin clients allowing users to interface over the
Internet with service providers, such as banks, online stores, news
providers, and entertainment content providers. I'm already writing this blog entry using exactly this technology!
Don't invest in companies that make personal computers.
So, how does the Google vs. Microsoft struggle fit into this landscape? They both see it coming and want to provide you with the means to partake of its bounties. The problem is that they have competition. All the makers of mobile devices, household appliances, TV set-top-boxes, telecommunications suppliers, and virtually anyone who makes anything with even the potential for Internet connectivity sees it coming, too. Especially, all the Internet service providers building all the computer clouds see it coming. Google and Microsoft are really just struggling to avoid being left behind!
Google does have one advantage, at least relative to Microsoft. Google is wisely basing its Chrome OS on Linux, which is the Open Source leader. To develop application software in a Linux-based thin-client environment, a company can hire a few pimply-faced ex-hackers who learned to roll their own Linux distribution before they reached puberty. Software engineers with expertise in the latest of the never-ending stream of Windows versions are harder to come by.
Basically, the days when anybody cares what operating system or browser your Internet-connected device uses are gone. In the thin-client/cloud-computing world of the future, like in the post-Civil-War land of Gone With the Wind, frankly, my dear, nobody is going to give a damn.
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