Chrome OS Will Not Be Anything Like Windows, OS X, or Ubuntu

Update: Gruber’s perspective. Lots of good insights. However, he misses the idea that Chrome OS is ubiquitous and therefore will be used in parallel with everything else.

In a WSJ article about how Google CEO Eric Schmidt resisted building a browser, I came across this telling quote about Chrome:

“I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way,” Mr. Page said.

And I’ve also been rewatching this video about how people have no clue what a browser is.

Since the announcement of Chrome OS earlier this week, I’ve been hearing and reading some different opinions, typically focused on whether or not the Google OS will destroy Microsoft. As the “What Is a Browser?” video suggests, this is about making it easier for people to get their lives into the cloud, and it might finally force Microsoft’s hand in completely reinventing its operating system business model (Windows as an source code project, cough cough), but that won’t be because the Google OS is a perfect imitator of Windows.

Remember those “web operating system” attempts and prototypes we’ve already seen? They borrow far too much from the desktop metaphor, and don’t focus on the two things that matters in a web operating system: speed and simplicity.

Speed and Simplicity

As the iPhone 3GS shows us, for the ubiquitous computing layer, interface speed is even more important than it normally is. I’m indignant if my desktop takes more than 30 seconds to boot up. But Google Chrome will divide that number by 10.

Perhaps in just a year or two we’ll be accessing the Google operating system in parallel to everything else - through a virtual machine that might take 3 seconds to boot up. Perhaps it will be more like an application performing all of the user-facing roles of an operating system, like a deeper extension of the Google Toolbar.

And when people think that they want to be searching for something, the intermediate step of having to load up your web browser - what are those again? - will be taken out of the equation.

And that will become the expectation - that when we want to search, it never should take more than a few seconds.

Of course, all the other benefits of cloud computing will have a huge impact, but only once Google can help us get out of our decades-long operating system funk by taking care of the speed and simplicity issues that are blocking the progress of the web’s evolution.