I’m happy with it for my mobile computing, and it’ll probably stay loaded on there until the Google OS comes out…hopefully the Google OS becomes available around the same time as the RC expires!

As for the article, it has its irritations (the title baring no relation to the content) and the phrase “It’s offering the ultimate alternative to Microsoft OS that’s vulnerable to viruses and other security threats…” which can be read as implying that the offering by Google is vulnerable to viruses, closed and complex, etc just as easily as it can be read correctly.

For example, if you wanted to make software for, say, baseball card collectors.. and the market was worth $1 million. You can’t justify spending more than that, because you’ll lose money. If a competing company is willing to invest as much as you to make competing products, you will, together, by overinvesting, reduce the potential profit. It’s good for the consumer, but can be bad for the companies. So the presence of big companies like Microsoft makes investment in innovation more risky. The small company has to plan for is ultimate purchase by Microsoft, or to cut a deal with Microsoft (for example, to sell the killer application on the Windows platform but not the competition, in exchange for MS not entering the market).

One way out of this conundrum is to stop selling software, and sell ads instead — customers can’t complain if they didn’t pay for it. Another way is to factor out the application into several smaller apps, and then, charge for integration, somehow. (Example: it’s free to edit photos, but, there’s a printing service that costs 25c per print.)

Yet another is to improve the software development environment so that software development costs less, so the cost of competing is lowered, and the potential profit margin increases. This opens up potential new markets that Microsoft may not be aware of, and considers too small to pursue.

Microsoft has Windows 7 and that’s it for the next few years. For a company as big as Microsoft, 1 or 2 years is just not enough time to react to anything. I predict they’ll lose the Netbook market completely. Google will end up dominating there and then move to the desktop market.

Microsoft cannot counter this, they can’t beat free, their whole business model is based around sales of Windows and Office, not advertising. Google can come in with their free and light OS, give it away and as long as it is absolutely dead easy to use, requires no skill at all to maintain, they’ll surely just eat up the whole Netbook market overnight.

Just think how much it has going for it. Auto updating for the client and backend, no virus or malware worries, fully automated backup of everything you do, the strong possibility of instant on, more stable than Windows with no apps to crash. Friendlier for developers who don’t have to exclusively develop for Google’s OS, knowing that anything they do for it, will also run in Windows, Linux and OS X. Hardware manufacturers can cut costs with such a thin and free client so Netbook costs don’t have to rise but could possibly drop and enjoy much longer life cycles.

If Microsoft can compete with that, I’d love to know the details of how. Their attempts at working in the cloud have been almost completely ignored by everyone and that represents years of work from them.

I think MS is fracked.