Google have today announced that they will be launching a full-featured operating system in direct competition with Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X. Both industry stalwarts will be concerned by the news, but cannot be surprised by Google’s move to dominate the computer user’s experience even further.
This move is likely to have come from Google’s desire to be involved with the offline usage of computers in addition to online functionality. The long term aim will, however, surely be to merge the two – with all of a user’s documents and even applications stored online meaning they are accessible from any computer.
Broadband connectivity to support this sort of approach is some time off in the UK. The only product available in today’s marketplace that can start to provide real-time access to documents and other substantial files over the internet is Virgin Media’s 50Mb broadband; with the average speed of broadband in the UK being 3-4Mb - fast enough to load music in real time, let alone full applications!
Despite this, other countries already have the infrastructure in place to support such a seismic shift in computing. It will be interesting to see whether the UK’s lagging behind in the broadband stakes leads to a ‘computer convergence divide’ between the nations who have next generation broadband (Japan, South Korea, Scandanavia) and those who don’t (Europe and the US).