raymor

What they didn't mention is how MS is driving traffic to Bing - by advertising on Google.
Any bets that Google is charging MS big bucks to send them crappy traffic that Google
already knows the true value of? The word "bing" is defined by dictionary.com as "a heap
or pile". I'd like to ask MS "Bing is a heaping pile of what, exactly?"

The author of the article also seems to be missing the point of Chrome OS. Chrome OS
isn't designed to be like Windows. That concept was nice in 1987, but it's 22 years later
and Google thinks it's time for a new concept. My brother expressed the idea well close
to ten years ago. He had asked me how big my hard drive was, and was a little surprised
when he found out it wasn't huge. Then he had a realization - "the internet IS your drive",
he said. Exactly. Chrome OS, designed for netbooks, doesn't need 2GB of RAM to run
bloated office software - the browser runs Google Docs, which provides your spreadsheets,
word processor, etc. There's no need for anything like Outlook to run on the computer - you
have gmail in the browser. The main purpose of the OS is just to run the browser - everything
else happens on line. Take 5 minutes to launch MS Streets and Trips? No thanks,
Google maps is better and faster - and free. With the Google OS approach, the software
is all free, so that saves hundreds of dollars. Most of the software runs on their servers,
not on the netbook, so a $200 netbook is all you need rather than GBs of RAM for Windows.
Software updates, dependencies, all of those hassles are gone when the software is a web site.
So the Google approach makes the computer faster, cheaper, and less hassle.

There are a few things you'll want to do locally, like plug in your MP3 player and transfer music.
That's no problem. I've been running Linux exclusively for many years and Linux can do
everything I need to do - without Google having even touched it yet. All Google, Acer, and
other partners need to do is smooth over a few of the minor rough spots.

There is one and only one reason I've ever run any MS software in the last ten years - to see
it's bugs. Someone tells me there is a bug in IE7 where it doesn't render our graphs correctly,
so I launch IE7 only to deal with it's bugs. 99.9% of users don't WANT bugs, so they have no
need for MS software, if you give them the better options presented in a way that makes sense
to them. Even those two times each year that I launch IE, I still do that within Linux.

The challenge for Google isn't to be more like Windows, but to present the new system to
users in way that makes it easy to use. The user who wants to work on a spreadsheet will
initially go to the programs menu, then the office sub-menu. There had better be an entry
for "Google Spreadsheets" there.