One of the motto of google is don’t be evil. But I have feeling that, google is moving in the direction of microsoft, bringing in a monopoly that would severely affect other browsers like firefox and opera and SAS players that compete directly with google over web applications.
Because, with Chrome OS, the browser being the main component, there will not be any scope for browser choice and chrome will be the only browser and all cloud applications will be forced to support chrome better than other browsers and it will eventually lead to the demise of browsers like firefox. And look at the path that google is taking, the support for video, audio and using the full capability of the system in the browser itself is in their future plan and with that the cloud applications will become powerful like native applications and they might even require you to install certain standard basic libraries for functioning properly (MFC/VB core equivalent of native applications) that the Chrome OS will become powerful enough in due course that they will eventually be ported to laptops and desktop.
(Actually I have a series doubt. What actually is the difference between a native applications collaborating over the net whenever needed and a web application with strong offline support and graphics processing, audio, video support. I dont know. Any help on this line is highly appreciated).
There were posts floating around in the net (eg, techcrunch), that Chrome OS is a death blow against microsoft, but it is not at all that. It is going to make microsoft release an IE OS, that contains only IE and with special handling for microsoft’s own web applications. If microsoft has released the IE OS, before google, then that might have created a bad name(monopoly) for microsoft, but now it will just ease their path.
Next is other SAS players. With Chrome OS, giving special privilege to google applications and IE OS giving special privilege, it is going to be hard time for SAS players that compete directly with google and microsoft because a simple link to google docs from Chrome OS is going to considerably reduce the chance for other players providing writer/doc funtionality.
Hi