Will Google Chrome OS be the Enterprise 2.0 OS?
Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand today, you can’t have failed to hear that Google has announced a new project to develop the Google Chrome Operating System.
Google came pretty late to the browser party – too late in fact. So targeting the operating system itself makes perfect sense. Some say it’s a direct threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop. That may turn out to be true, although I’d strongly advise Microsoft to acquire eyeOS or one of the many Web OS vendors.
What I find most interesting however, given Google’s forays into the enterprise social software space, is whether GCOS has the potential to be the first serious attempt at an Enterprise 2.0 operating system. It has everything going for it: open source; lightweight; speed; simplicity; security. Not to mention the fact that it will run any web-based application, and therefore any web-based social software application.
I fully expect to see the whole suite of Google Enterprise applications being pushed heavily through GCOS.
What do you think: will GCOS be the answer to all your Enterprise 2.0 prayers?
I think the google offerings will continue to penetrate at the SME end where ease of use and low cost over rides all but the most serious security concerns. However the global giants will be much harder to win over – not least until they finally accept that all that carefully horded internal data is gathering digital dust not value – and that by selectively allowing access to external creative minds they could massively exploit the value of this info before it goes hopelessly out of date 
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If it were a new OS and it were indeed as secure as Google are trying to sell it as, it would be genuinely interesting.
As it is, it’s just another half-baked Linux inception with a ‘custom’ (does that mean propietary? that’s naughty if so) windowing system thrown on top. The assertion that *nix OSes are secure is hardly helped by the fact that most users log on with administrative rights. That’s where the whole root (oh, the pun) of the security issues in Enterprise 2.0 resides.