Will Chrome OS substitutes be controlling the netbook market?

In today’s computing world, 12 months is a ‘light year’. We have seen various versions of Chromium, Cherry’s and lately our own Netbook Pack. Qualcomm to support Google’s Chrome OS means it ’supports’ the idea.

Quote: “Qualcomm plans to support Chrome, Google Inc’s upcoming operating system for small computers known as netbooks, the company’s chief executive, Paul Jacobs, said on Friday“. But wait, is there more to the story? The executive, a first-time keynote speaker at the annual gadget festival, also said 15 different device makers are designing about 40 products that will use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip for smartphones and mobile computing devices. Very good. What about the rest?

With Google and its device partners gearing up to drop the first Chrome OS netbooks on us by year’s end, 2010 may well be called the ‘Year of theNetbook’; it might already be an ‘old hat’. Whilst the market predictions believe there will be a significant increase of netbook sales in 2010, what happens to all the existing netbooks? Upgrade (downgrade), Windows platform, or..? There are 7 Mill university students ready to upgrade… Behind the scenes, companies like whytwitter have not been asleep either; having sold more than 12,000 copies in the first 3 days of launch, it seems they’ve got it right. Check here: Netbook Pack.

The pitch is easy: What’s not to like about a $300 (or less) netbook, lighter than a pound, travelling with us everywhere we go, booting up in 7 seconds and running much faster than the current Windows version, laptops or Mac computers? Since Chrome OS runs all its software on a cloud I won’t need to buy, install or update any software – sounds good. (whytwitter commented)

Remember, Google succeeded with organic and paid search because it understands what people want – and that’s the whole pitch for Chrome OS – a different model of computing, lean and mean, running web applications really, really fast and costing next to nothing. So what stops the market to develop all sorts of “Chromish” versions prior and along side? Nothing. And consumers have the choice, well before Chrome OS hits the market.

Twitter: @why_tweat