Windows Express

Although I don’t usually give in to peer pressure (if you forget high school…), this tasty morsel is just too good to pass up. The techie world is ablaze with hype over Google’s announcement yesterday that they will be releasing an operating system, Chrome OS, based on their Chrome browser with a tentative release date for late 2010. I’ve read quite a few blog postings on this the last couple days and I can honestly say that fanboys are out in full force. I’ll link to some of these at the end of the article, as I’ll be pulling some information from them. The biggest questions are: will this have an impact on Microsoft? If so, how big of an impact will it be? Are Google’s claims for a fast, safe operating system likely to be true? My answers are maybe, small, and that depends. I’m going to break down these questions, along with some other Chrome OS topics, as unbiased as I can. And before I start, let me add this disclaimer: I do not claim to be a professional of any kind. I’m simply a soon-to-be-graduated Information Systems major at a major US university who loves to keep an ear to the ground of technology. I love seeing what’s over the horizon and telling people what I think about it. Let’s get started.

Google started as an online search & advertising compnay. That is their niche. They make approximately 97% of their revenue in that area and dominate challengers such as Yahoo & Bing (although Bing is actually becoming a threat) and cast old search engines such as Ask Jeeves into the abyss like Darth Maul. On top of that, they started offering some simple online services such as GMail, which is widely used. Google keeps expanding their service base and now totes office productivity software and mobile phone operating systems which have had minimal impact on the market so far. However, the open source web-based David has challenged Goliath with a full desktop operating system. My Goliath analogy isn’t good enough, however… Microsoft is not the Goliath of non-Mac OSs, it’s the Great White Shark, the Tyrannasaurus Rex, the leviathan of the non-Mac OS. (I say non-Mac because Windows is not a competitor in the Mac world – Mac OS X effectively holds a monopoly on the hardware. Even Macs that have Windows have Mac OS on them. Not fair Apple, not fair. But I digress.)

What Google is doing with Chrome OS is honorable. They realize that people are using the internet more and more. People don’t want to worry about updates, upkeep, or security. They want things to work fast and efficiently. Hopefully Google can deliver with a product that can help in all of these areas. I sincerely hope they do. If they can then it is good for everyone. True competition assures the best products and drives prices down. If I wanted Google to fail I would be an idiot. However, there are some problems with Google’s vision. Here is a short list of what I see:

1. Release date: Late 2010. Are you serious? I know it’s not exactly easy to write code, test, debug, and release an operating system, but this date is way too far away. It’s not even late 2009 yet. How much will technology change from now until then? Google better be looking into a crystal ball. Their timing in regard to other netbook OSs is not very advantageous either. Microsoft is releasing Windows 7 later this month to manufacturers, and the operating system will be officially in the wild on October 22nd. That is a whole year ahead of Google’s anticipated release date, and Windows 7 is so highly touted as a fast, light, stable OS that netbook makers are dumping Windows XP and Linux Ubuntu in favor of Windows 7-only systems. By the time Chrome OS is released Windows 7 will already be on Service Pack 1 and Windows 8 will already be in development. In order for this to be a fair fight Google should have developed this last year instead of giving Microsoft a one-year head start.

2. The target market: Netbooks. Okay. Finally my opinion on netbooks comes out. I will not deny that they have at sometimes appeared attractive to me. Techies like small gadgets. I wanted one… until I looked at the specs. Netbooks are tiny, underpowered (also known as handicapped) laptop computers. One of my professors makes fun of kids in class if they pull out a netbook. The only reason manufacturers are pushing them so hard is because we are in a recession and they have massive margins on plastic one-core laptops with no optical drives. What confuses me is that they are really not that much smaller than other laptop computers. Popular laptop models are around 13 inches while netbooks are around 8. There may only be 1 pound in weight between these.  I sat next to a student in one of my classes who had a netbook. For the record, I have a 15” VAIO. Our backpacks were the same size (you would think he would have his netbook in his pocket or something). I imagine there was a 3-4 pound difference between our computers. But as I was working on my glorious full-sized keyboard with my huge screen, multitasking between the internet, word processing, and image editing, my counterpart was struggling trying to type notes onto his Will Ferrell-sized computer (remember the SNL sketch?). I will gladly lug my bag of bricks around to have more flexibility. I’ll also mention that at my university, which has well over 30,000 students that I assume are all laptop-equipped, I haven’t seen more than a dozen netbooks since their inception. No matter what people say, not everyone is buying a netbook. There are also some statistics on netbooks in one of the blogs I read that mentioned that regular PCs had a 28% decrease in sales over a certain period while netbooks saw a 68% increase. What does this mean? That instead of selling 10,000,000 PCs last year, maybe they only sold 7,500,000. Netbook sales went up from 100,000 to 168,000 though! (These are fake figures inserted for sarcastic comedic value) And one more nugget: Google already has some vendors lined up for Chrome OS. Really smart Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. Go with the OS you have never seen and hasn’t even been developed yet. If Google wanted to make waves with an OS, netbooks are the wrong target market. While it fits their goal (the cloud), it isn’t likely to make an impact.

3. Chrome OS: Fast and secure! Google should make sure they are right before they make claims about speed and security. True, Chrome is fast… but it relies on operating system resource management and hardware performance. Google will have to build a software system ground up that can take advantage of hardware capability and translate that into web app speed. I don’t doubt that they can do it, but they’ve never done it before. And here is the back-breaker on the speed of Chrome OS: even if the OS is the fastest ever, because it is web-centered, it is ALL dependent on connection speed. Also, although it is getting close, the internet is not always available. And when I say available, I mean decent speed. Ever used a 3G connection on a full-blown computer? I don’t know about you, but when I log onto a laptop I expect a certain amount of speed on the internet. When I don’t get it, I get mad. Even pulling mobile-phone designed web pages on a 3G network on an iPhone can be extremely frustrating. Now imagine your entire Windows operating system depending on that connection for email, word processing, system utilities, etc. Pulling your hair out yet? Don’t worry, as long as you are on a Wi-Fi network you will be okay. Hopefully. Another problem is Google’s claims of security on Chrome OS. They are entirely speaking too soon. If Chrome makes any impact on the OS wars at all, hackers will want the trophy of breaking it. I’m sure some 16 year-old in Kazakhstan with a case of Mountain Dew Game Fuel will find some kind of vulnerability in the first few months of Chrome OS’s release. Browsers are historically the most vulnerable part of an operating system, and Google’s programmers are not immune to making mistakes. There will be zero-day vulnerabilities and OS patches, just like any other browser or operating system. “(People) don’t want to… have to worry about constant software updates.” Well said Google. Good luck.

4. Google’s lack of market penetration is a problem. GMail was a hit. I like Google Street View too. Other than that, Google hasn’t really done a great job at getting people to use their products. From what I’ve seen, Google Apps is mainly used by college student group projects where the students have Macs and PCs, have to work on the same document at the same time, and don’t want to bother with conversion of files. They just barely took the “beta” label off of it, and they’re not likely to take over a huge share of the market anytime soon. Android is starting to appear on mobile phones, but almost every other platform has more users, including iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, WebOS on the new Palm Pre, Symbian for Nokia phones, and Blackberry OS. Android is good in that it’s open-source and adaptable, but it just hasn’t been groundbreaking. More phones are being released with Android this year, so stay tuned to that story. The bottom line is that Google needs to learn how to finish. They are brilliant at coming up with innovative products and getting them to beta, but it seems to me that they fail after that. Products that stay in beta for ages, little or no advertising of new products, and slow adoption lead to great products going unnoticed. Even the Chrome browser, which has proven to be the fastest in correctly loading webpages and killing others in JavaScript speed tests, is 4th in the browser race. Fourth. Behind three others. Three slower browsers. One of which is the ridiculed Internet Explorer that fails Acid tests. If that is not a product failure then I don’t know what the term means. IE is sold through Windows, FireFox has been around long enough that it sells itself, and Apple ads and media hype sell Safari. DO SOMETHING GOOGLE! There is also some criticism from one of the linked articles that Google uses their most brilliant programmers and project managers to start up and launch a product, and then they move on to the next “it” thing. If they expect to make Chrome OS a winner they must start from the beginning with their best staff until it has beaten every other netbook OS out there. Another HUGE problem here is familiarity. Even if Chrome OS is better than Windows 7, how many people will go with the unfamiliar interface?

Now let me state it again: I have nothing against Google. I have a GMail account, I use Google search occasionally (Bing is my default), Google Maps helps me from getting lost, and I use Google Docs at school. I love competition; it’s in everyone’s best interests. But some of Google’s decisions are interesting to say the least. What do you think? Should a supposedly groundbreaking OS be released on a type of machine that the minority has in their possession? Should it be Linux, which for years has ridden in the backseat as the third wheel while Windows drives around the prom queen? Should they make claims of speed and security before any code has been written, in contrast to Apple and Microsoft’s moves of saying nothing but “We might be working on something,” and then making a press release when they have something to show? Is Google going to end their losing streak with Chrome OS and finally bring their application bundle into the forefront? Will Batman and Robin finally defeat the Penguin and his cronies? So far everything is just speculation, but hopefully we will see a shred of something before the spring.

As promised, here is some good reading on Chrome OS:
Official Google Blog Entry
Will Google’s OS Make the Desktop Safe?
Google Chrome OS Will Reshape Desktop Landscape
Google: The World’s Most Successful Failure?
Google Announces Chrome OS Tech Partners

I have quite the busy week ahead of me.  Tonight is my night to cook dinner. I still need to upgrade my laptop to the Windows 7 RC (which I downloaded a week ago) from Build 7077.  I need to reinstall Windows Mobile Device Center and sync my smartphone.  After that I need to build a new Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM for my phone and flash it.  On Monday my summer semester starts, and I’m still working full-time while taking 18 credits.  The joy of being a college student *sigh*.  Then, and ONLY then, I’m going to start my freeware reviews - breaking freeware into different categories and trying out all of them.  After that I’ll tell you which ones are worth it!  Check out this thread over at Windows Guides Forums to see which programs I’m going to test out and give me some more suggestions.  I’m going to get back to work now, but I’ll catch you in a few days!

Sorry it has taken so long to post on my progress for the triple boot project.  I have run into some snags on the next step – installing Mac OS X.  So, in the words of Ignacio from Nacho Libre – “Let’s get down to the nitty gritty…”

So now I have Linux Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows 7 installed on seperate partitions in a dual-boot environment using the GRUB boot loader from Linux.  It works great!  My first step after this was to locate an .iso file from which to make a boot disk for OSX.  If you browse your native torrent site or visit Neo from The Matrix you will soon have a copy of one of the several distributions of OSX86, the name given to an OSX installation disk with patches added to run on a normal X86 PC.  The two I found were iDeneb v1.4 10.5.6 and Kalyway 10.5.2.  iDeneb is the newer version, obviously, so that was my first choice to install. You can find installation insructions on the OSX86 project wiki. Go to Their Website and browse around.

After burning the disc I restarted my computer (make sure to set the BIOS to boot from DVD first) and the installation took off.  It takes a long time for the installation menu to pop up, but everything related to the installation went just fine.  Select your native language and continue to the next screen.  From here you can use the “Disk Utility” function from the Utilities tab at the top of the screen and format the partition of your choosing into a Mac Extended Journal format.  Continue to the next screen and select that partition for the installation.  Continue.

Here is the hard part. You MUST select “customize” before installing and check all of the packages that correspond to your hardware.  This is where the problems begin.  It takes a lot of trial and error, but if you get everything right the installation should work after the reboot.  After selecting everything continue on with the installation.  The installer will check the DVD for errors and then install OSX.  After it is complete (about 10 minutes on my machine) it will reboot.  After your BIOS screen it should boot into Darwin, OSX’s bootlader.  From here, if you press F8, you can type a number of things into the command line to try and get the installation to work.

• -F=Something about switching driver loading, so if you have installed the wrong patch it may skip it and still load correctly.
• -V=Verbose mode, which lists the commands on the screen instead of showing the Apple logo with a spinning wheel.  Useful to see where problems arise if they do.
• -X=Safe mode
• platform=X86PC – Tells the bootlader that your computer isn’t a Mac basically.  Has solved some people’s problems.
• rd=diskXsY tells OSX where to boot from, where X is the Hard Drive number (usually 0) and Y is the partition number on the drive.  You can see this on the Darwin bootloader screen where it will usually look something like this:

   Windows partition (0,1)
   OSX86 (0,3)

Anyways, my installations so far have gotten hung with an error message saying “Still waiting for root device.”  I have tried a number of configurations and will try the Kalyway disk as well.  After that I’ll post an update.

By the way, this will wipe out the Windows bootloader.  If you want to replace it I figured out a very easy way.

1. Open the start menu, type “cmd”, and hit enter to open the command prompt.
2. Type “diskpart” and hit enter to open the disk partition tool.
3. Type “list disk” and hit enter to show all the hard disks.
4. Type “select disk X” and hit enter, where disk X is the hard disk your Windows partition is.
5. Type “list partition” and hit enter to show all the partitions on disk X.
6. Type “select parition X” and hit enter, where partition X is your Windows partition.
7. Type “active” and hit enter. This marks your Windows partition as the active one during booting.
8. Type “exit” and hit enter. Close the command prompt.

After you reboot your computer the Windows boot manager should be back in effect and you won’t have to deal with Darwin anymore. Just a little something I picked up that is useful.  You can also do this to mark y0ur OSX partition as active to bring back the Darwin bootloader.  I’m assuming the same for Linux as well with GRUB.

Sorry for the ridiculously long post; this isn’t a short process.  Stay tuned because later I will post my results for the ongoing triple boot project, along with reviews of some freeware (idea courtesy of Rich from Mintywhite) and some other posts.

Welcome to Windows Express!  Let me know what YOU would like to hear about first.  I have a few projects in the works, including a review of the official Windows 7 Release Candidate sometime next month and a review of a pre-beta leak of Windows Mobile 6.5 running on my HTC Touch Pro (complete with screenshots and video of it in use). 

Any other ideas are greatly appreciated and if I like your idea enough, it just may end up here!  So get to commenting and I will do my best to get this blog roaring along.  Thanks everyone and welcome!