What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS?

November 27, 2009 | Vijay Pandurangan | Comments |
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Picture 1Chrome OS is Google’s latest entry into the consumer space. It is designed to be an operating system that runs on customized hardware and provides the user with only a state-of-the art browser running HTML-5 and some plugins. The tech (and mainstream) media has seen no shortage of opinions about its meaning and future impact on the industry. Unfortunately, I think most people have missed some of the key implications of Chrome OS.

[As a disclosure, I am a former Google employee, having worked there from 2002 to 2008, but I don't have any inside information on this project. In fact I didn't even know of its existence before I left.]

Google has two main aims with this project:

  • To use the Google brand and buzz about its “game-changing OS” to push for new and better web apps using nascent technology. This lets Google reduce its customers’ dependence on local apps it does not control.
  • Once a lot of these apps are deployed and become heavily used, the mass market will force owners of closed systems like the iPhone to implement support for HTML-5, the latest version of HTML, and rich web interfaces. Coupled with net neutrality (which Google currently strongly supporting) this will allow Google to circumvent uncooperative devices and network providers, and access consumers currently hidden behind locked system.

Here is a more detailed analysis:

People are switching to netbooks in droves. Ever since the advent of AJAX and Web 2.0, a great number of things that people used to do using local apps are being done by web-based applications. This transformation is by no means complete; it is clear that many interfaces are not refined and much critical functionality is absent, but the trend is undeniable.

Modern operating systems have very rich interfaces that give application developers and users a great deal of power. This is great in some ways — it lets you write awesome local applications, and offers great performance. However, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” A rich interface provides ample opportunities for unforeseen consequences, bugs, viruses and other bad things.

As power and performance becomes less important (computers are getting faster, and word processing isn’t getting any more CPU intensive), it is becoming more difficult to justify all the extra responsibility. Although hardware and user-facing software has changed incredibly over the past three decades, operating systems are remarkably stagnant – virtual memory really hasn’t changed much in 15 years, and from the user’s perspective, file systems haven’t changed much since the days of UNIX, in the 1970s.

Motivations:

People these days mostly use their computers for a few key things: Internet browsing, dealing with email, writing documents, writing spreadsheets, playing music, watching video, and editing photos. As increasing numbers of people join the online world (especially in developing countries), users need to stay as happy with their Internet-related experiences. More happy users lead to more searches and more advertising revenue.

Google needs to ensure that the web and everything people use to access the web stays as open as possible. If closed ecosystems dominated by unfriendly companies, such as Apple (and its iPhone), and Microsoft (with Windows desktop and mobile) gain power, Google won’t have unfettered access to the end-user. To do challenge them, Google needs to reduce switching costs and make users indifferent about which computing devices they use by commodifying them. The Chrome OS plan is to entice users to move as much data as possible into the “cloud”, making the data and apps transparently follow the user onto whatever device he or she happens to be using.

Goals:

Google realizes that if this momentum towards cloud-based computing stalls, it will be in a difficult position — it will depend on others for its access to customers. So success of Chrome OS is not really about whether a lot of people use Chrome OS!

Instead, success (or failure) will be measured by the creation of new and better web apps using HTML-5 and HTML-5-related technology. This will allow Google to reduce dependence on local apps it does not and cannot control. (By the way, HTML-5 is the latest version of HTML, and will allow web sites to add offline storage — the ability to store data in your browser for use when disconnected from the internet — better video playback and graphics support, along with interaction between different documents.)

Let me repeat this: Success is not about whether a lot of people use Chrome OS. It’s about whether a lot of people end up using Web applications. This is a simple conclusion, really, but very profound. Even if everyone ends up using some other OS, as long as all the apps they use are web-based, Google wins, because its products can compete on a level playing field. Instead of building special applications that run on your OS and store files through proprietary methods, a web application will run on any device, making them the same from the consumer’s perspective. Critically, enhancements proposed in HTML-5 will allow them to run offline as well as online. (In fact, Chrome OS, being open source, will probably be forked into a less proprietary system distributed by any number of parties. Even if this hurts the user base of Google Chrome, Google wins.)

Obstacles facing Chrome OS:

One of the largest looming issues for Chrome OS is the planned lack of local file system support. For various reasons (some copyright-related) most people store their music and movies locally on their hard drives. Removing local filesystems will reduce the difficulty of using the system but will pose huge problems for movies, photos, and music. Unless a decent web-based solution for this problem is invented soon, Chrome OS’ usefulness might be limited. The dearth of good photo editing solutions online is really no different than the poor quality of web applications — they will need to improve.

Moving down this path implies the users’ data will almost completely be stored primarily in the cloud. Having all their data concentrated in one location might give users pause: What if the service is unavailable when the data are needed? What if the service goes out of business or is hacked? These perceptions will need to be handled effectively.

What about Android?

Android, Google’s operating system for mobile phones, is going to be BIG. Google desperately needs to prevent the iPhone from building increasing global market dominance in its current form. Android already provides a better hardware abstraction layer, better testing, limited interfaces, better security and includes a full-fledged browser. It satisfies pretty much all of the requirements set out by the public docs of Chrome OS, and already includes support for local applications. In two years, there will be an even larger group of Android apps available. Looking at why Google wants to create a new OS and not simply co-opt (or even fork) Android provides the most convincing evidence of my hypothesis yet — that Google is more concerned about the proliferation of web apps than the wide adoption of Chrome OS.

Here are motivations people have raised for separating Chrome OS and Android:

  • Too many uses of Android will slow development on the OS internally. This may have a little bit of truth, but I think it’s not a good reason. Linux survives multiple changes to the source code from all kinds of people doing all kinds of different things with it, and it doesn’t slow down development that much. This is certainly true now that Linux is stable, but is probably true of its earlier, less solid stages too.
  • People use touch-screen devices differently than keyboard-and-mouse-only devices. This may be true, but what evidence is there that touch-screens won’t be on most netbooks within two years? If one wants to build a browser-based device, one should keep in mind that a touch screen is far more useful than a mouse.
  • Android isn’t ready for use on desktops. It’s too hard to get to work on different processors. This is a weaker argument — a lot of people have already ported Android to Atom processors, and there doesn’t seem to be much trouble getting it to run.
  • Adding a very different hardware platform will make UI and app design too hard. This is a pretty good argument. Supporting widely disparate hardware is not going to be trivial for app developers — the wide distribution in Android version and hardware configurations is already causing some angst. There’s no need to insist that all applications run on an Android notebook.
  • Android is for things with small screens you can make calls on. Chrome OS is for other things. Also a decent argument. In the next few years, Google Voice, Skype, and pervasive Internet will mean that phone and video calls will certainly be made from notebooks. Besides, any optimization you would make to Chrome OS to speed up browsing could easily be made to the Android codebase. Most of Android’s codebase is not designed to deal with calls, but with enhanced security, easy application development, and maximization of battery life — all things that Chrome OS will need.

Conclusions:

While Google would really love to have a large user base, even a Chrome OS with few users will not be a failure. The number of installs is secondary to the number of web-based applications that it fosters. Google will do everything in its power to make this happen. This includes building better web apps and cloud-based storage tools itself, and using its brand to scare other companies into building apps (for fear of missing out when Chrome OS gets big).

If Google promoted Android instead of Chrome OS, this strategy would not work; developers would simply focus on building Android apps. Android apps would help Google’s phones and make Android netbooks work nicely, but would not help Google penetrate other established and closed ecosystems. Getting the same apps to work across platforms is the key to success because it allows hardware commodification and easy migration paths between the systems.

And this is why Google is building Chrome OS.

vijayVijay Pandurangan worked for Google for six years, designing and implementing some of the core systems infrastructure for the company as well as parts of the ads system. He now runs a consulting firm called Olima Ventures and is an angel investor. You can read his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.

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  • zato
    "Once a lot of these apps are deployed and become heavily used, the mass market will force owners of closed systems like the iPhone to implement support for HTML-5, the latest version of HTML, and rich web interfaces."

    The iPhone is already HTML5 compatible, you POS anti-Apple propagandist. The webkit browser is an open-source project of Apple, Inc., the #1 driving force behind HTML5.
  • Yeah, that is a good point; the iPhone does already suport much of the HTML5 spec. (One of the two editors of the spec works at Apple, the other at Google). I'm not inherently anti-Apple -- in fact, I use many of their products, including the iPhone. It's just that the path they're taking with the iPhone has so far been on a trajectory that could easily lead to it being a walled-off garden: the iPhone app approval process is capricious and torturous for developers, and is sometimes used for political purposes. (A good example of this is the Google Voice or the gaming system emulator app debacles). Apple has a well-known desire to exert tight control over their products' user experience, and it's unclear how much they will really be willing to deviate from it. At any rate, the continued presence of HTML5 support on the iPhone only strengthens Google's position and reinforces the reasons for building Chrome OS.

    Google wants to get developers to spend their energy making web applications instead of iPhone or Windows (or whatever) apps. And the way to do this is to make sure everyone provides support for the latest web standards, blurring the difference between specialised and web applications.
  • CTO
    The whole "cloud" notion, however appealing, has zero chance of succeeding in the USA because Internet access is actually quite limited. It's a reality that is unnoticed by inhabitants of major cities, but in the fly-over states, and even in large but sparsely-populated areas of California, there's simply no reasonable way to connect to the Internet, nevermind connect with decent bandwidth.

    Venture beyond big cities and cellphone coverage is sparse, and 3G coverage is absolutely absent. I just took a 6 week drive through 10 western states, toting 3 laptops and 2 aircards, and could use them only in a few places. Even Interstate highways and some sort-of-major cities had no coverage. Often, even a cellphone had no signal. Wi-fi was non-existent except at a couple of McDonalds.

    How can web apps dominate if only half the country/population has reliable access to the Internet? Continuous access is even rarer. Fast access is actually a small phenomenon, taken for granted but about as far less common than good coffee.

    Sure, the solution is to build out the Internet, cellsystem and wi-fi, but who will pay for this? The under-served and unserved-areas won't be growing anytime soon, so the customer base is to small to fund or even justify build up/out. Will Google be erecting towers and laying fiber across Montana and Arizona? Not even California has good Internet coverage, or even cellphone coverage -- not even California! I've driven for hours on Interstates and US highways and never found a signal.

    Success in Europe might be assured, because the single standard for mobile technology and more dense population resulted in solid coverage. But with the US, with several competing standards, means the cost of covering the country is many times higher per square mile. Notice the hilltops with several cell towers crowded together, when there should be just one, shared by all the carriers as in Europe. It's crazy, but a vivid illustration of the problem.

    For decades to come, there will be two computing/connecting worlds: With local apps/storage, and with cloud apps/storage. And local apps/storage won't just be luddites, it will be the only ubiquitous, reliable, therefore mainstream computing platform.

    So, Google's strategy cannot succeed.
  • anonymous
    @CTO you should get some information about google gears which gives all google apps seamless offline support

    @article i think the perpective is a wrong. its not that google is forcing their idea onto people it's just the nextlogical step in IT technology
  • You're right; the Internet really isn't available everywhere. But Google really only makes money on the Internet (via ads, etc) and so as callous as it sounds, people who don't have Internet are kind of irrelevant. Google will probably lobby hard to expand Internet access ASAP, but other than that, they won't do much. The two-world scenario is fine, as long as Google has unfettered access to the plugged-in one, and the plugged-out one is shrinking over time.
  • Christiano
    to this:
    "The whole "cloud" notion, however appealing, has zero chance of succeeding in the USA because Internet access is actually quite limited."
    i say:
    hmm, not so sure I agree. Didn't we just invest billions in exactly this project? I know it will take years to complete broadband infrastructure, but it seems to me that the point of the article is that Google doesn't need the cloud based model to succeed universally right away at all points on (or off) the net, it's that it needs to leverage high quality web based applications as viable, and/or better alternative to closed local apps. As you note, there are huge populations of well connected users who will participate in the cloud model, especially with all the advantages it provides. That means Google will succeed, in spite of all the regional/rural holdouts.

    Also, the idea that Google's Chrome is going to be totally cloud based is wrong-headed. Chrome is Linux based. Does anyone believe there won't be support for hard drives, and everything else the way there is in any Linux distro? All Google has said is that Google itself won't be building or supporting that. And why should they? Chrome is open sourced. The drivers already exist. And another thing: flash storage is growing and Chrome will support that. There will be offline access to all apps. But Google isn't stressing that point.

    The blogger here is right that Google wants to use Chrome as leverage to enforce standards and accessibility - on the web. The local is outside of their domain. No one can truly compete well in a closed system. They want a level playing field on the Internet, which they see as the ultimate and final "OS" for end users (and i agree).

    And this is good for Google, but it is also good for everyone who uses computers. (everyone who doesn't care about maintaining an artificial monopoly in computer space). Google would love Chrome to get big, and I believe it will. But most important, Google is indicating to its competitors and allies, that the cloud is here to stay. Chrome is as much a strategic gambit as it is a end product.

    That isn't to say that Chrome isn't changing the game. We talk about the cloud in relation to Chrome, but I notice another, more important thing going on: the re-conceptualizing of what a computer is. The Desktop model is old, and computers are increasingly powerful. People talk about thin clients and main frames, but Chrome, using the increased power of the PC, is really both PC and thin client.

    One thing that I really like about Chrome is that it essentially detaches the GUI from it's old moorings. What we used to think of as the OS now is merely a convention: a rectangular frame. Anything, and I mean anything, can go in that frame. This is something that I believe people overlook when they complain that Chrome won't be able to do all the things that a closed/local OS can. Why not? Every program you run on Windows or Mac runs in a rectangle. In Chrome, the underlying "OS" is gone but the rectangle is more powerful and potent than ever. Does anyone think that any number of "file systems" or "desktops" with local access won't be built that can run in the Chrome browser? Of course they will. What is missing is the stodgy, fixed Desktop convention - to be replaced by... whatever you want!

    We can't get stuck thinking that computers won't evolve as rapidly again as they have in the past. It used to take 2 minutes to get a usable GUI up and running. And once that was on screen we felt pretty good that we were in a stable environment (just like an actual desktop!) Now all that is going away, not because our options are being limited, but because computers are faster and more stable than ever.

    Lastly I will say that I'm not a betting man, but if I was, my money is on Google for their strategy to succeed.
  • ninetynine
    Great article. People who claim ChromeOS is too limited or won't appeal to the masses should look at this article. It was pretty obvious when Google claimed they were designing an OS that was almost purely net-centric, they had bigger plans than just pushing a new Linux distro.
  • charlax
    I totally agree with your analysis. I have written a dissertation about "Google Chrome as a launching platform" for web-related innovations supported by Google. Here is it: http://d3in.org/pages/en/memoire
  • "Google needs to ensure that the web and everything people use to access the web stays as open as possible."

    I agree with that and Chrome OS is probably the right way to achieve this. People will get basic functionality "for free" and no way any competing platform can outperform Googles free offer. However - as you indicated - this is about power and when it's about power nothing is that simple as it initially seems. It always ends with a balance of power between competing suppliers and a balance of power between suppliers and consumers.
    That's right: a balance of power with consumers! As a consumer I am totally aware of the fact that "free" Google services are not really free but only in exchange of the possibility I offer to influence my thoughts and behavior with adware. And it is also up to a certain point I want to make use of that. So I consider it to be a privilege to also have access to paid software and paid content, knowing the provider of paid services is acting in my interest, not in the advertisements interest and knowing I have free choice where to spend my money.
    I absolutely welcome any platform supporting open HTML5 with good webapp support for any webapp supplier. But I also will stick with a paid for platform acting in its consumers interest and providing easy and trusted payment options.

    "One of the largest looming issues for Chrome OS is the planned lack of local file system support."

    This needn't be so much of a problem. A file system can be offered as a cloud service, like for instance Dropbox does. All Chrome OS has to do is make a well managed and controlled bridge between the sandbox of the webapp that wants to use the file system and the webapp that provides the webservice. For consumers interest it would be quite desirable to have choice between different suppliers of the "file-system" service.
  • John Lazzaro
    "What evidence is there that touch-screens won’t be on most netbooks within two years?"

    Holding your arm up to touch a vertical screen for extended periods of time makes for
    tired muscles. This isn't a problem when using cell-phone touch screens, because the
    phone is small and light enough to fit in one hand, which you hold more or less horizontally
    as you touch it with the other hand. This state of affairs goes way back to the failure of the
    light pen as a CRT interface in the mid-70s -- its a form-factor thing, not a technology thing.

    Whatever hope there is for touch-screens for laptop-sized displays lies in the direction
    of tablet form factors, which is part of the reason why the buzz around the rumored Apple
    tablet project is so strong.
  • Thanks for your analysis of the future. I saw the video a few days ago and wondered what Google might be up to. Obviously they are so committed to the web and advertising revenue in that medium that getting more people off their desktop and into the cloud is paramount.
    I remember that Bill Gates had a dream to have a PC on every desktop in the world.
    May be Google has a dream to get every PC to fly into the clouds
    http://www.onesherpa.com
  • dukeoconnor
    Hopefully unlike Gates, Google's dreams are not of achieving a monopoly but of living up to their mantra of doing no evil. Polar opposites, no?
  • costas
    While Google talks about the Cloud, Microsoft built a Cloud OS (Azure). Bottom line in terms of Operating Systems Google is nowhere near the capacity of Microsoft or Apple. So in the end all they'll manage to do is to open the market for other players to exploit it.
  • its a conspiracy theory
  • Mark in CA
    You may have overlooked the biggest difference between Android and ChromeOS: Android runs native apps and has a file system; ChromeOS doesn't.
  • Bob
    "One of the largest looming issues for Chrome OS is the planned lack of local file system support."

    The description of Chrome OS was that the root partition (system files) would be read-only (locked), but that leaves open the remainder of local storage (eg. home space) for potential full user access. If Chrome OS takes less than 10 GB (maybe only 2?) and the typical netbook currently has >= 160 GB, that leaves plenty for user files (music, videos, etc). You noted an advantage of HTML5 and future web apps will be manipulation of local files, which would necessitate the existence of such file systems. Sure, much could be in the cloud, but local storage (internal or external drives) will likely remain and provide security and backup as noted.
  • Chrome will, of course, support the local storage of files through the browser. When I wrote "local file system support", I meant local file access in a traditional sense: files, directories, etc. accessible without using browser-provided primitives.

    You're absolutely right; if better web apps materialize -- especially ones that use browser storage effectively -- usability shouldn't suffer. However building such apps is non-trivial, especially with a totally new design paradigm.
  • areak
    It is nice os.
  • Jons
    While I agree that ChromeOS's real purpose is to advance the state of web apps, I think that it will end up, even to Google's own surprise, revolutionizing the OS landscape. It's a new model to fit a new world just like the PC was new when mainframe computers were prevalent. Android is really of the older model and I believe it is only a stop gap before ChromeOS overtakes everything. When mobile 4G connectivity becomes widespread, or maybe later generations, Android will be replaced by ChromeOS on the phone. It's going to be a slow decades long process with ChromeOS starting in niche areas like netbooks, moving to desktops at home before heading to business applications and finally the phone.
  • george v.
    How will Google's proposed deal to buy On2 Technology enter into any of these plans?
  • i think google wants to prove that "it's a no 1".
    Right now they providing best browser,best social networking sites, best maps, best info, best search engine and now a wonderful OS.
    really awesome....
  • nice synopsis give behind the scene and i am into seo and i should say that google is our big brother in my field. thanku google
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