Google Chrome OS: The wolf is now out of the forest

In reading Google's blog post announcing its Chrome Operating System, I kept coming back to this line: "It's our attempt to re-think what the operating system should be."  It is modest and restrained, "an attempt," writes Google, and yet an entirely bold and radical statement, a "re-think" of the operating system.

Microsoft has been thinking about just such a threat for a long, long time. In its 1998 antitrust fight against the U.S., it argued that its behavior was constrained by unknown threats to its Windows OS. "Much of Microsoft's future competition is unknown," wrote Richard Schmalensee, dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT and one of Microsoft's expert economic witnesses.

The government's economic expert, Franklin Fisher, also a professor at MIT, countered that the idea that "a wolf might come out of the forest" to challenge Microsoft wasn't a serious argument to make. He didn't discount the idea, but what mattered was the power the company had at the time.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson dismissed Microsoft's notion that the company was restrained by its concerns about the unknown future, but he showed some serious respect for the idea that technology can quickly change the competitive landscape. Wrote Jackson:

What eventually displaces the leader is often not competition from another product within the same software category, but rather a technological advance that renders the boundaries defining the category obsolete. These events, in which categories are redefined and leaders are superseded in the process, are spoken of as "inflection points."

It was the Internet that was an inflection point, not Netscape's browser, which was much of the focus of this case.  This browser promised a means of delivering applications via the Web but it needed an OS. As far as Microsoft was concerned, Netscape was a "trespasser on its territory," wrote the judge.

Judge Jackson had it in his mind that the browser, using middleware technologies such as Java, was "opening the way for non-Microsoft operating systems to emerge as acceptable substitutes for Windows."  But Jackson was basing this on theoretical arguments that were by then academic; the future of Netscape was already set.  

Google is solving the Netscape problem by delivering an operating system along with the browser. But Google Chrome OS isn't an inflection point and is only loosely a "re-thinking" of the OS. The thought has been around for awhile now, but the wolf is now finally out of the forest.

Google Chrome OS

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