Much ado about Chrome OS

Aug 18 2010 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product, The Daily Geek

The blogo-/twitter-sphere was briefly alit last week when this article came out on TechCrunch.

I think the simplest explanation is probably the correct one in this case: Google is working on a 3G/Broadband connection manager for Chrome OS and they working with Verizon to validate it on the Verizon network.

The bigger question though, in my mind, is what kind of device will Chrome OS appear on?

Android, Google’s “other” OS, is coming along strong and is poised to overtake Apple’s iOS in terms of shipment volume. Android is no longer limited to smartphones. It will be shipping on everything from music/media players to tablets from Samsung and Motorola.

How will Chrome OS fit in this picture?

One possibility is that Chrome OS will ship on regular PCs as a companion OS to Windows. A well known example of such an approach (and I would say the “pioneer” in this space) is DeviceVM’s Splashtop. This alternate OS environment ships on notebooks from HP, Lenovo, Dell etc and allows the user to get onto the Internet within seconds of powering up his PC, without having to boot up Windows.

However, this approach is not game changing. DeviceVM is already shipping such a solution.

What is will be game changing however, is to leverage the lightweight nature of Chrome OS and ship it on inexpensive hardware. Conceivably, we would be talking about sub-$200 netbooks/tablets with Chrome OS as the sole operating system. An old blog article from ARM.com alludes to this approach.

In other words, Chrome OS will not be Android’s “big brother”, but it will be the lightweight, single-purpose younger brother. If you want an all-in-one multi-purpose mobile device, get one with Android. If you want an inexpensive bring-you-to-the Internet device with a great web browsing experience, get one with Chrome OS.

This makes sense in a way. The Android web browser today, for example, is really quite limited. Firstly, by the small screen size and low screen resolution of the devices it appears on. Secondly, popular Chrome browser features like bookmarks sync, extensions are not (yet) available for it.

A somewhat single-purpose device still makes sense if they are low-cost enough. We have seen that Amazon’s Kindle continues to sell strongly in spite of the iPad.

What is Verizon’s role in this scenario?

Verizon has been selling 3G/broadband-capable notebooks and netbooks. A natural extension to this product portfolio will be an Internet tablet.

The business model can also get interesting here. For example, the consumer gets a Chrome OS tablet for free when she signs up for a 2-year data plan. Google and Verizon monetize from both the subscription and ad revenue that result from the use of Google services and web properties.

Update (11am PDT): Just saw this on Engadget: Chrome OS tablet coming from Google and Verizon on Black Friday?

Update (5pm PDT): Looks like the Engadget article is all speculation. The link above has been updated. The source of this speculation, Lee Matthews, probably read someone’s blog about Chrome OS (ahem…cough) and added more sauce to the mix…

Disclaimer: I am a Senior Director, Program Management at DevicevM. I wrote this article to express my personal views.


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Memo to Jerry: SELL!

May 20 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

There are reports of Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo’s search business.

My take on it?

Yahoo should sell.

Although it’s too early to declare that Internet search is being commoditized, Google’s lead as the preferred search engine means that anyone else trying to compete in that space is just wasting time.

Think of it, in order for Yahoo to continue to compete with Google as a search engine, it needs to invest in continually improving the search technology. Then there’s all the storage and infrastructure costs etc. At the same time, Yahoo’s search monetization is much less than that of Google.

It is going to be difficult for Yahoo to give up search. After all, that company started off in that space. All that emotional attachment to the past and talk about “core business” will get in the way of cooler heads. I don’t know if Jerry Yang will have the clout, guts and objectivity to jettison the search business.

Yahoo has a bunch of other properties which, IMHO, have more value than the search engine: Flickr, Yahoo Groups, YIM, www.yahoo.com etc

Flickr, in particular, has a pretty good future. Almost all popular social networking sites allow you to import photos automatically from Flickr. This makes it the default choice for social networkers who have tons of photos to share. Adobe’s new Photoshop Express also links to Flickr, which I thought was very clever of Adobe. I have not tried out Flickr’s new video capabilities, but I think that Flickr has a lot of room for growth.

Likewise for Yahoo Groups. If you are looking for dedicated mailing lists for your running club or MBA classmates, you don’t have to look further than Yahoo Groups. I have used Google Groups and Yahoo is still much better.

So Yahoo should objectively identify properties that have real value to users and room for growth. It should then dedicate resources to building up these properties to make them the “default” destination for their respective categories. Yahoo should also find ways to link these properties together seamlessly so that end users don’t get the impression that they are dealing with very disparate websites. Google does a really bad job of this.

Monetization? Well, just go with Google.

Oh, and take that money from Microsoft for the search business.

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