As a young adolescent, it was visual bliss watching the late 70’s Wonder Woman TV reruns. She had those cool bullet-deflecting wrist bands, an invisible airplane, and a seat at the Hall of Justice. Not scared of anyone, Wonder Woman always was sucessful at beating up the bad guys.
Best of all, in two seconds Wonder Woman could transform from ordinary person into hot superhero chick with knee-high red boots, ready to take on the world.
If Wonder Woman could boot-up that fast why do I still have to painfully wait a long time for my computer too boot-up? It’s not as if Microsoft or Apple hasn’t had decades of time and tons of capital to figure this one out. It’s such a simple user experience desire, yet agonizingly unfulfilled.
In the past few months both Microsoft and Apple launched their latest operating system software, respectfully Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. As I’ve been testing both of these systems for months, I am pleased to report they are nice improvements to previous versions and run rather well. However, the big caveat – it still takes a crazy long time to boot-up the computer. In general, an operating system (OS) software means nothing to most folks as they don’t quite know what it does. An OS upgrade is kind of like getting a new roof on your house – you focus on it when you know there is a problem or when you are making the purchase choice, then never think about it until the next purchase cycle. However, being handicapped to wait a long time when booting up your computer changes how you use your computer. It makes you think twice whether you should invest the time and commit to a computer experience, rather than incorporate it into your busy life as you would a mobile phone. However, with smaller computers gaining momentum and the trend toward mobile computing, things need to change.
Here comes Google with their latest announcement of the Chrome Operating System.
For most of us in the media business, depending on the day, you either love or hate Google. Today I love Google as I predict Chrome’s technology advancements will be a game changer, paradigm shift, gate jumper, or whatever you want to call the overall value benefit it provides computer users. Google has figured out a novel approach to solving many of the pain points for computer users, such as:
1) Computer boot-up in three to four seconds, rather than minutes. Plus, suspend to live in a second.
2) No more local security issues
3) Centralized data and application storage on the web (AKA, Cloud Services.) In other words, if you drop your computer in the toilet – just get another computer and simply login to get everything (settings, email, data, etc.) as you had it before.
4) No more hardware compatibility issues
According to October 2009 numbers from Net Applications, Microsoft currently has 93% market share for their Windows operating system, with Apple at 5%, and Linux at 1%. When Chrome officially launches (expected in the second half of 2010) and goes open source (source code becomes available to everyone for FREE,) I predict the Microsoft Windows OS to greatly suffer in terms of market share. More specifically, we could see a repeat of the awful downturn Microsoft is experiencing with their Windows Mobile OS.
If Google can pull this off by delivering a solution that does everything they claim it will, I say, “bring it on and boot it up.”
What do you think?
