The importance of Chrome OS to Google

People say the strangest things. For example, I read almost continuously that industry analysts are questioning the need for another Google OS after Android: that the tablet and handheld are the way of the future, and that the [cloud|net][book|top]/whatever is yesterday's format, ready for burial in the graveyard of corporate computing along with Windows.

Yawn.

Do these people really write 1,000-page market reports on their iPhones? Or do they spend most of their time gallivanting about from one conference to another, occasionally firing off one-line "strategy" emails to their researchers and imagining that, like themselves, nobody really needs a keyboard?

Well that's that off my chest. In what follows, I'll simply assume that no one is stupid enough to imagine that the keyboard-inclusive form factor is dead, at least not for production / work rather than for some consumption / leisure uses.

So let's agree that Chrome OS has at least a future in the cloudtop niche. Why is that important to Google, and what to make of the comment that Android and Chrome OS may, over time, grow together?

I think I found the key in a throwaway sentence in Google revives ‘network computer’ with dual-OS assault on MS by one "Wireless Watch" on The Register:

Set-up, log-in and user interface are the same on all Chrome devices because everything is synced in the browser.

The problem with Android, everyone agrees, is that the platform is dreadfully fragmented, both on a hardware level and more importantly for identity and familiarity, on a software / presentation level. Whatever the proposed importance of Chrome OS for Google in the past, its current, and likely growing, importance is that it will put all things Google front and centre of the user experience.

Yes, it's open source. So yes, although the Google-approved home page is likely to live somewhere on Google's servers (and they'd be mad not to make a special home page optimised for Chrome OS users), evil manufacturers are likely to work out how to substitute their own start page, all cluttered up with locally-installed apps touting their partners' wares. But unlike with Android, the user will be able to leave behind all that bought-and-paid-for "enrichment" guff with the click of a bookmark. And what's the betting that any Chrome OS hardware will come with access to a better-than-free version of Google Apps? Perhaps not quite up to enterprise level, but definitely better than the free version.

So if the importance of the OS is that it will emphasise the Google brand, what about the comment that Android and Chrome OS may grow together? Well, we are all rather more sophisticated nowadays with the notion of an OS's user interface being separate from the guts of the OS itself: anyone who's experimented with Gnome and KDE on Linux will be familiar with that idea. I don't know if the OS foundations of Chrome OS and Android are the same or not [it's now on my to-do list to find out], but considering that they will share many of the same constraints with regard to power management and security (and perhaps, in the future, automatic updating — what a rude awakening for the current crop of Android customisers that would be!) then it might not be stretching things too far to see Android and Chrome OS as simply alternate usaer interfaces on a deeper OS stack.