Uh, I hate to burst the PR bubble here, but any “Google OS” will be mostly re-branded linux.

While I find this very exciting — I’m already fully committed Ubuntu and Fedora/CentOS user, this article’s contention is only hyperbole, as of yet. I’ll risk a rare actual blog posting on my assertions.

Large industries that have in the past committed to IIS-based web presence and Content Management/Sharepoint sites, no fear of any imminent Google OS will make any immediate dent.

I’d re-label this more an incursion than a war. Individuals who might someday be able to choose their OS from the sales floor will still gravitate towad the familiar branding of Microsoft.

Where the landscape will change is with us experimenters out here, the early adopters who threw a Live CD on an old pc just to get more life out of it…and learned that it could, without the bloat. That moment introduces the first seduction of the linux platform.

The next seduction is after you’ve learned to use cross-platform applications like OpenOffice, perhaps Mozilla Thunderbird, with plugins that cope marginally well with Exchange.

The big argument opposing linux in the larger market is the lack of a phone-support model. However Ubuntu supports this with a paid support model that’s optional from the Ubuntu site, or Dell, even.

And for what it’s worth, you have to pay *extra* for true microsoft support if doing business directly with MS, and you pay a lot.

As individual consumers, that PC’s vendor support (i.e. Dell, HP, etc) might be free for that first year, but without paying for the extension of the warranty, after the first year you’re on your own as an end user anyway. Think about it.

However out in the commercial world, the temptation won’t be there yet; industry is firmly and necessarily wrapped around closed-source MS-based vendor dependency for the near term.

However market share for every user’s small-business and home desktop might well diminish for Microsoft, and there might be where those trenches will be dug.

THE battle between Microsoft and Google entered a new phase last week with the announcement of Google’s Chrome Operating System — a direct attack on Microsoft Windows.

This isn’t the first salvo in a war that has already seen Google lob its Chrome Web browser against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google pit its Android smart-phone operating system against Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Microsoft, in turn, aim its new search technology, Bing, against Google’s very heart — the Google search engine.

This is all heady stuff and good for lots of press, but in the end none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.

via NYTimes.com.