*GEEK REPORT*
The end of Micro$oft?

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8139711.stm

Discuss in not less than 15 words.
(Ethelred is watching cheese grow, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 9:50, 12 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

I bet it isn't the end of microsoft,

(PsychoChomp, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 9:51, Reply)

It'll be a pretty damned
impressive clash of the titans though.
(Ethelred is watching cheese grow, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 9:52, Reply)

Who knows
If they refrain from having the thing send all sorts of data to themselves then maybe. If they don't I can't see it getting very far at all. I love google chrome but use Iron instead to avoid sending quite so much data to google.

I'm expecting it to be *nix based and hopefully it'll be open source so other *nix based OSes can make use of parts of it.
( Captain V, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 9:57, Reply)

It is a *nix based platform
and it'll be open source, so seems pretty interesting so far :)
(Ethelred is watching cheese grow, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:02, Reply)

Clearly I've failed to read the article properly
Or there's a lot more info about than the BBC reported.
( Captain V, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:14, Reply)

Adblock
I heard Adblock is (understandably) blocked through Chrome, true or false?

That's pretty much the only thing keeping me from giving it a whirl
(b3tamax Mate, you're fat and I'll throw you in the river, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 11:04, Reply)

They've got some clout
but are they really going to be able to get enough manufacturers to install it as the base OS? Man in the street isn't going to want it, it'll end up like Firefox - a small chunk of the market, maybe 10%, and then creep up incrementally over the next 10 years.
( The Light in Chains don't touch the Pope's boner, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 9:58, Reply)

10% of a market that size is
Still rather large.
( Cawl, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:03, Reply)

Especially for such a shit product!
Opera FTW!
(bill, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:09, Reply)

I disagree
The netbook market is probably the best place to start if you're going to try and dislodge M$. Netbooks aren't particularly well suited to the windows interface so it's possible to design one that's good enough for people to get over the barrier that familiarity creates (think smart phones).

The biggest problem will be interoperability with M$ office and allowing people to install software designed for windows. It's easily possible to make everything else "just work" in a much better way than windows already does.

If they have success with netbooks other notebooks, budget desktops and small businesses shouldn't be out of reach.
( Captain V, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:09, Reply)

No
Linux on the desktop will happen one day but this isn't it.

I'd suspect that an ubuntu derivative is much more likely to succeed in this area before this does.

Also, from the article: "This is the first time we have had a truly competitive OS on the market in years. This is potentially disruptive and is the first real attempt by anyone to go after Microsoft." This guy is a twat, for a start it is nowhere near being "on the market" yet and secondly a kernel, window manager and browser is not a OS, needs a bit more than that to take on a real operating system.

Thirdly the MS stranglehold of the enterprise desktop is not going away any time soon so speculation that this is an MS killer is just fucking dumb frankly.
(bill, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:08, Reply)

Though did you notice...
...that Google's Engineering Director is called Linus?

Upson, not Torvald, admittedly, but it made me smile....
(LongJohnBaldry, Wed 8 Jul 2009, 10:27, Reply)