My Thoughts on Google ChromeOS Mean for Networking ?

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.

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