Archive for the 'Business trends' category

Chrome OS is here.. almost

Dec 14 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business trends, Products

I wrote a blog on Dec 2nd wondering what happened to Chrome OS. Lo and behold, on Dec 7th, Google held a special event (live feed from Sean Hollister of Engadget) where Chrome OS was revealed, along with details of a pre-production/production-level, limited-edition Chrome OS netbook, the Cr-48.

The mass market version of a Chrome OS system would ship only mid-2011 from Acer and Samsung.

The folks at “The Register” got their hands one of the units and came out with a review.

Chrome OS also has its detractors

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, thinks that not having your own data on your own property is akin to losing your legal rights to your data. The example he gives is that in the US, the police require a search warrant to get access your property, but don’t necessarily need to when trying to get to your data on some one else’s property e.g. Google’s servers. In some ways, Stallman is right:  look at the amount of influence members of the US government has over corporations when it comes to WikiLeaks. This means that corporations running cloud services can block access to your own data if you offend the wrong people.

The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, thinks that Chrome OS will be “killed next year” or “merged” with Android. In this case, I think Buchheit is basically channeling the confusion surrounding the positioning of Chrome OS with respect to Google’s other operating systems, Android. The announcement on Dec 7th and the delivery of the Cr-48 onto users’ hands have not dispelled that confusion.

Part of this comes from our mental association linking larger, physical devices with larger, more full-function software. In contrast, Google is targeting a full-function operating system (Android) at physically smaller, mobile devices while leaving Chrome OS, a browser-only-single-application operating system, to power physically larger and presumably more powerful devices like netbooks.

Perhaps we will get more clarity when the mass market Chrome OS devices are released next year. At the least, their price points will give an indication of how Google is positioning them.

In a previous article, I have postulated that perhaps the ideal device for Chrome OS will be a very low cost, full Internet experience tablet; basically, an iPad without the complexity of on-device applications and with support for Adobe Flash.

I still think that this is the ideal scenario. At the least, Google should created an embedded version of Chrome OS for use in devices like printers etc. For example, I just bought an HP D110a printer. This printer represents a whole new generation of smart, Internet-savvy devices that can connect to the Internet and even download firmware upgrades for themselves. One key promise of the D110a is that you can access “applications” on the Internet and print content without using a computer. The promise fails on the D110a because it has a tiny screen, resulting in a very poor user interface. With a more complex operating system like Chrome OS integrated with the D110a, the user will have a more complete Internet experience, and hence a higher tendency to print content directly from the printer (which obviously would drive the sale of printer cartridges…). HP has said that they will be leveraging webOS for this end in the future. I think Google should also explore that possibility.

Finally, Brad Pitt-lookalike and founder and CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, is confused about the Chrome app store. An app store of websites is not a new concept. When Splashtop 2.0 was launched earlier this year and shipped with Lenovo on their netbooks, one feature was an app catalog that contained a list of popular websites. Users used this to customize their Splashtop experience by making their favorite websites more easily available on the operating system launchbar.

What is new with the Chrome app store is the availability of web sites that have integrated with the various Google APIs. Some of the web pages of these web sites are then still available even when the Chrome OS device is offline i.e. not connected to the Internet.

This, in my opinion, is a very important factor for the success of Chrome OS, if Google continues targeting it as the sole operating system on devices like netbooks and notebooks. Without an offline capability, Chrome OS devices will have zero value (other than as paperweight) in markets where Internet access is either intermittent or costly. This applies to most of the third world and much of the developed world.

In the mean time, some folks have installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a Cr-48 and you can see the video with the link below

Ubuntu on the Cr-48.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Splashtop Inc (formerly DeviceVM, Inc), which developed the Splashtop product.

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Whither Chrome OS?

Dec 02 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business trends

It was widely reported (or rumored) back in August (see my “Much ado about Chrome OS” blog) that Google would be shipping a Chrome OS notebook or tablet by Black Friday (aka November 26th 2010).

Well, that day has come and gone and there’s still no sign of Chrome OS shipping.

It looks like, based on this report by Engadget, that Chrome OS systems will be generally available in 2011, but that units will be available  this year for internal use à la Nexus One.

My earlier blog also suggested that perhaps Chrome OS would be positioned as a tablet OS for low cost, always-connected Internet devices whereas a richer OS like Android would make more sense for feature-rich devices. However, Eric Schmidt, at Web 2.0, made it clear that Chrome OS would be for devices with keyboards while Android would primarily be for touch (tell that to my T-Mobile G2).

Unfortunately, that clarification still doesn’t tell me why one would buy a Chrome OS device over an Android one. Google has some work to do to differentiate and position its two operating systems.

In the mean time, Jolicloud has beaten Google to the punch by launching the Jolibook, a netbook running the Jolicloud OS (based on Ubuntu). It is currently available only in the UK.

I have tried out Jolicloud version 1.0 and find it easy to use, but nothing spectacular. It has a very good integration with cloud storage services like Dropbox and Zumodrive. This allows you to share data between the Jolibook and your regular PC, making the former a great companion device.

Jolibook also includes a number of social features including a tie-in with Facebook log-in and its own social network that allows you to find out what other Jolicloud users are doing e.g. which are the popular applications etc. This secondary social network creates some level of stickiness: when you have invested some time/effort into setting this up, you will be less likely to switch to another environment.

My former employer, DeviceVM (now called Splashtop Inc), has also jumped into the fray, but in the reverse direction: whereas you are able to buy notebooks from HP, Dell, Sony and others, with Splashtop already installed, you were previously not able to download a version of Splashtop and install it on a system that you already have. To remedy that, Splashtop OS is now available for download, in beta form, from the Splashtop Inc website. In a “one up” to Google, Splashtop comes with Bing (thanks to moi) as the default Internet search engine.

At the end of the day, the big question is how these non-Windows operating systems will change the way we use computers or the Internet. With Splashtop, DeviceVM was successful in changing boot time expectations: Windows 7 boots much faster than Vista, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that the new MacBook Airs had this new feature called “Instant-On”, and there is a bunch of new technology (described here) to allow super fast “boot” with Linux. DeviceVM was also the first to realize that users really want to use the Internet most of the time and had a product to cater to that expectation.

The next step will be a change in user behavior aided by all this new technology and the increasingly social nature of the Internet. 2011 is definitely going to be an interesting year.

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The ‘Facebook killer’ – great minds think alike

Nov 29 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business trends

My previous article, “Diaspora, Facebook alternative, goes live“, seems to have set some minds ticking.

Brad Pitt-lookalike and founder-CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, wrote an article on CNN.com that repeated essentially the same key points that I made:

  • How Facebook became better than MySpace: “This new feature wasn’t just a “better MySpace” but a completely different approach to social interaction that replaced static pages with streams of constantly updated information.“
  • Switching costs: “There are plenty of ways for a social network to fail; the fact that your friends are already on Facebook and not Diaspora is the most obvious issue.“
  • That Diaspora and other social networks have to offer a better social experience than Facebook in order to gain market share: “So, if recent history is a guide, Facebook need not worry about Diaspora. Such incremental improvements almost never create new market leaders. Instead, it takes a completely different approach to unseat incumbents.“

I am not claiming that Pete Cashmore copied my article. Instead, I’m rather flattered by the validation of the key concepts of my article.

That’s Thought Leadership!

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Diaspora, Facebook alternative, goes live

Nov 24 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business trends

It’s in open alpha and you can sign up for their mailing list at joindiaspora.com

These guys have a lot of publicity. It remains to be seen how well they will do as a Facebook alternative/replacement. It is not impossible, as Facebook was able to wrest the social media crown from MySpace. But the former is now more entrenched than MySpace was and Diaspora must offer something unique to users that will make the user switching cost (described in my previous post) worth absorbing.

Diaspora’s current user value proposition is privacy and ownership. This is a poke (pun not intended) at Facebook which has a bad reputation (deserved or undeserved) in those areas.

The question is whether users care about that. I suspect that they do, but not enough to switch.

Diaspora and other Facebook alternatives out there (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, Elgg) have to offer a better social experience in order to gain share from Facebook.

An example is the Facebook status/news feed. This feature was launched a few years after Facebook started. Before that, Facebook had a MySpace-like landing page. As a Facebook user, I find that the feed holds the key value of Facebook: it gives the impression that the user is engaged with friends.

Diaspora needs to identify a similar key feature. When that happens, the trick is to hold on to that as a Diaspora-exclusive experience. That is also not easy as Facebook now has the size and resources to quickly duplicate anything that an upstart can come up with.

Hopefully, I’ll get my Diaspora invitation soon and will be able to try it out and “share” my impressions.

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