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domesticmouse | |
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Google have announced Google Chrome OS. This is interesting on several fronts. Firstly, and most obviously, this is an open statement of war on Microsoft. It is written in the text of the announcement "We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better." This device will have no MS APIs on it. None. Nada. The end of the MS lock in. But that's just a cover story. We all knew MS lost quite some time ago. They are just collecting monopoly rent on the dying market while they try and figure out what to do next. In fact, MS are doing quite interesting research into programming languages, and I expect a resurgent Microsoft within a couple of years based on their C# 4 tooling and concurrency aware environments. No, the real target is much more interesting. The key phrase of this announcement is that they are releasing a full OS stack for hardware vendors with zero per unit costs. The target here is Adobe. Either adobe ships flash player embedded for free, and loses money hand over fist on the codecs, or they don't ship flash player embedded for free, and Google serves YouTube using the HTML5 video codec and Adobe loses their market dominance in Flash to HTML5. Classical pincer move. The interesting thing is players who may wind up being casualties are the embedded device providers, specifically Nokia and Apple. The embedded device players who are asking for this from Google are the cut price device manufacturers in China, and they don't have the ability to write their own user interfaces. Nokia and Apple do. But, with this, the chinese manufacturers get to open the user interface building the the whole world of web developers. So, Adobe are going to bleed. Nokia and Apple need to smarten up their game on embedded device programming. Fun times. =)
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From: notagod |
Date: July 9th, 2009 12:08 am (UTC) |
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Fun times no matter what, thanks to 2 events. The first and foremost being apple entering the phone market, the second being google entering the device market. I'll agree, nokia is getting a (much needed) kick in the ass. We're a juggernaut tho.
Somewhat tellingly tho, nokia's looking to shift the focus of profit making onto ovi (and further by creating environment/infrastructure via qt)...
Google win here as their profit niche isn't the hardware, (or the software). Apple kinda win, with ubiquity, but at a cost (they're missing large segments of markets, and outside the US are still fighting nokia, and even RIM for market dominance in their own market). Nokia eventually wins, due to shifting profit focus away from the hardware. Adobe to put it mildly, are fucked unless they come up with some way to generate a revenue stream. SVG, HTML5, javafx, silverlight, even Qt's dui, they're all encroaching upon one of adobes core markets. Agreed, interesting times.
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Microsoft were never going to win Netbooks anyway, given their asinine strategy of making sure their offering was crap by making sure to limit its usefulness for the very things people want to use netbooks for.
I think at least part of the Chrome OS situation is essentially Google thinking that with Microsoft deciding to cripple its efforts in the netbook arena (and Apple not even bothering to compete), free Linux based netbooks are going to be the winner in that space -- and seeing an opportunity to take over that market with google branded netbooks using Chrome rather than leaving it all to Ubuntu and Firefox. Basically, its a control play to scoop up and control what is now the Ubuntu market.
You are probably onto something with Adobe. But I think Flash is already in a losing position with Apple already refusing to support it on iPhones. Flash just isn't going to make it out of the desktop space, which means its crashing and burning. And they'll probably spend most of their effort fighting Silverlight, which is not going to achieve anything except cannibalising Flex/Flash developer mind share, so matters only to Adobe.
I don't think Apple will care in the slightest. Apples traditional strategy for platforms that do less than they offer, but cheaper, is to ignore them. And continue offering a more expensive, more fully featured, option, that will be preferred by Apple customers. Plus rely on their current (and unlikely to change much) absolutely massive superiority on app availability for phones. I think Apple already have smartened up their game in the ways that matter (Iphone os x 3.0 is much better at basic phone functionality than os x 2 was), and have already decided that this 'completely ruling the high end of the market and relying on brand dominance for the lower part' strategy that has worked for so long with the iPod is going to keep on working just fine for phones. I think they are probably right, and Android is the only opposition they have to care about (and that not for some time yet, by which time it may be too late).
And of course Nokia shouldn't care about Google, but I don't think Chrome OS changes things much for them -- they should already have been worrying about Android, which I think they have more to fear from, and of course Apple is kicking their arse in smartphones.
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From: tcpip |
Date: July 15th, 2009 10:16 am (UTC) |
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