More traffic, more firewall load.

If you are a Service Provider, this means more traffic on your data backbone. 3G connections will increase, 3G data traffic will increase, and those firewalls that protect the 3G Data network will have a lot more TCP connections to Google Apps that are held open for hours. Start planning to upgrade your firewalls real soon.

A return to networking standards

Google uses the Internet, and softare that developers want to use. This means that poor quality protocols from Microsoft will become less important and less relevant. I mean, CIFS/SMB is a pain in anyone’s network and the sooner it goes away the better.

This also means improved security, since open protocols are more easily learned, understood and handled by firewalls and their operators.

Better netbooks.

Windows 7 and/or Linux aren’t optimised for netbook use and give a crappy experience. Its probable that Google will change the interface to make it better experience.

Everyone has a netbook these days to console into routers and switches. Its a good thing.

Cheap netbooks.

Prices on Netbooks looked set to rise since they would all have Windows 7 installed. The real money for Netbooks is when the Telcos provide them for free with a 3G connection plan, and using GoogleOS means cheaper netbook than an equivalent Windows 7. I’m thinking that a GoogleOS netbook will have a range of carrier branded services within Google Apps. They will love that.

Microsoft Windows pricing will have to drop

It means Microsoft pricing plans on Windows 7 look really expensive. At every level. GoogleOS will be free (and later open source), Apple is doing Snow Leopard for thirty bucks, and Linux remains free.

Breaking the lockin

Every time someone uses an operating system that IS NOT MS Windows, there is a good chance that the “I only know Windows” view is changed. Too many users think that they only ‘know’ Windows and once they realise that all operating systems are basically the same, people will open their minds. Therefore, the ‘world’ will become less dependent on Microsoft, which is generally acknowledged to be a goodthing.

It also validates *nix, since it is likely to be based on Linux or Unix. Expect to see more people introduced to Linux, and some of them to switchover.

IE ‘losing market share’ turns into ‘fading rapidly’

More degradation of the market share for Internet Explorer. Microsoft IE lost several percentage points THIS WEEK. Microsoft IE has already lost the war for proprietary standards and the corporate’s are starting the transition to Firefox for security and performance. More support for Chrome on GoogleOS will see less market share for IE. Expect to see this spiral accelerate in the coming months.

It’s not a Microsoft killer

Microsoft is too big to kill outright, but reducing Windows revenue by billions while investing millions on reworking an existing product (Linux) is good business. Make Microsoft smaller and you have better control, which is pretty much what Microsoft did for the last twenty years.

The bad things ?

Frankly, I am not a believer in the cloud. By my thinking serious ‘cloud computing’ is about ten or fifteen years away. I won’t be trusting Google with my computing, but for low end, non critical, temporary things (like email) it’s good enough.

Cloud Computing = good enough. Yeah, the whole cloud thing is a kludge today and the idea that public clouds can provide real services is a dream. Email and Web hosting is a good fit for cloud computing, but not much beyond that. I still think that home servers will fit this niche and be available before cloud computing is.