As always, there are some good articles to read on the Chromebook launch if you choose to get journalistic coverage on it. The best ones in my opinion are here, here and here. Read on below if you want to know why I believe it could be a game changer.Google previewed its Chrome OS to thousands of developers via the CR-48 giveaway. I was fortunate to get my hands on one for a limited time through a friend and came back appreciating the polish of the OS. I am an avid user of the Chrome browser and its Web Store paradigm and would love to see it extended as an OS on laptops. In its annual Google IO conference last week, Google announced two Chromebooks coming out this summer from Samsung
and Acer
. You can read more about the hardware here and here but what is really interesting is the subscription/leasing model for schools and businesses that Google is advocating. This has a potential to be a game changer.For a home user it might seem weird that there is actually a market for supposedly dumbed down, almost thin-client like devices. But as the success of the iPad demonstrates, people are not always looking for the greatest assemblage of hardware with a tons of software. Instead they are looking for simple UI and the easiest and cheapest way to get their work done, consistently and reliably. To that effect, the leasing model works very well for many businesses (Google says 75% of the businesses they engaged with loved the Chromebook concept) and educational institutions that want to save on pricey software, expensive maintenance contracts and hardware that borders on irrelevent in 3-4 years. The iPad has been hitting the school sweetspot the last year or so and Chrome will take it a step further by unloading much of the school's responsibility from the mix. And who wouldnt love to get away from managing the software update process for good?Not to be just caught in the hype, there are some worthy reads on what it will take for the paradigm to work meaningfully. And just as with mobile OS ecosystems, MIT Technology Review believes that it all starts with Apps. An ITWorld article extrapolates the apps availability to a further level of if and when most software vendors will be on board with the cloud paradigm and create a cloud friendly version of their business tools. As with all conventional approaches to business IT management, there are worries about unmanaged and silent updates and need to be able to be on the cloud always. But there were such questions on the iPad too?. Isnt that now a corporate mainstay?Remember, it is about the paradigm, not just about the OS or the device.
