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Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the bigger picture.

It's a tectonic shift in computing. We're going back to the dumb terminal/mainframe model. Apple will weather it just fine I'm sure b/c they control a shitload of devices. Microsoft will not. If they were dead before, they're worse than dead now.

Google will control the other half of devices but hopefully in a 'non-evil' way. I sincerely hope owning a device with Chrome OS doesn't force a user into using Google services although I'm sure there will be some tie-in.

It's about to get interesting..

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It's more a threat to Apple.

What google are proposing is to sell a web browser only appliance - for a limited number of users who only use their windows laptop to run ie this is great, they no longer have to worry about viruses or steal ms-office to write a simple letter.

Google can have many more apps for this than apple, because every website is n 'app', developers can write apps simply using javascript/html - there is no need to buy a mac, learn objective C and join apples dev program and learn what secret signs you need to know to get your app approved.

Google don't need to approve the app in the same way that they don't need to approve your website.

To Microsoft, who make their money from business customers running SQLServer and Windows server licenses, this is about as relevent as Nokia shipping a new edition of symbian.

Problem with your argument is that everything that Chrome OS runs (web apps), also runs on Windows, Mac, Linux. The reverse is not true. Win32/64/PEF/Mach-O binaries do not execute on Chrome OS.

Mac apps don’t need to be approved. And Google’s (promising) iPhone competitor is called Android, not Chrome OS.

And this was tried in businesses with the client/server model in the 90's as well. That failed, as much as I think what Google is aiming for here will fail except for a small niche of computer users (unless there is a light-years advancement in webapps replacing desktop).

In any event, I actually have no worries for Microsoft. They have a huge share of the web space already, and are already targeting webapps of their products (even if they have to play catch up, they'll get there).

Apple will have problems because their market consists of people that like their products just to be different and to appear in vogue. When that can be accomplished without buying overpriced hardware, see Apple's share of the PC market drop.

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