Microsoft has no need to worry about Chrome OS

Chrome OS will give Microsoft the competition it needs to ward off the regulators

Google's announcement that it will be entering the operating system market has caused a big stir, but it is unlikely to cause anyone at Microsoft to lose sleep, and more than a few senior managers at Redmond will be pleased as punch at the news.

On the face of it, some have seen the announcement of Chrome OS as another attack on Microsoft. After all, Google Apps was a direct shot across Redmond's bows in that it gave away similar applications to Microsoft's Office suite, which is a huge cash cow for the company.

Surely Chrome OS is just an expansion of this corporate war? Well, not as such. First off let's look at what Chrome OS actually is. It's really just a new front end to a Linux kernel. There are plenty of Linux distributions out there at the moment, and none of them is really threatening Microsoft's hold on the operating system market.

Secondly, the new operating system is aimed at netbooks which, while a fast growing section of the computer market, isn't anywhere near as big a deal as PCs, servers and laptops.

Windows is holding onto its market share in the netbook segment, and there are already preinstalled versions of Linux available for the market. But people aren't going for them in big numbers, despite some being clearly superior to Windows Vista.

Netbooks are primarily consumer devices, and consumers have been raised with Microsoft systems for the past 15 years and are unlikely to risk anything new. Similarly, manufacturers are used to installing Windows and know they can sell systems with it.

This brings us on to the next point: preinstalling. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have remained pretty quiet about Chrome OS, and it will have to be preinstalled to succeed. Skilled computer users might be able to install and debug an operating system, but few businesses or consumers will want to bother. They want something that works straight out of the box, or as near to that as possible.

Naysayers might point out that computer manufacturers are motivated by cost, and that Chrome OS will be free. But there are already plenty of free operating systems out there, and OEMs are far more concerned about what people will buy rather than saving a licensing fee that they can pass on to the purchaser anyway.

Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian, among others, have been offering enterprise-ready operating systems for years at a fraction of the cost of Windows, yet OEMs have not dipped much more than a tentative toe in the water to try them.

Another element is the broadly favourable response to Windows 7, which is due out later this year. While Vista is an almost universally recognised dog of an operating system, Windows 7 actually looks rather good and businesses in particular are eager to try it out, since most of them have stuck with XP and could use Windows 7 to jump the entire Vista upgrade step.