The Disruptive Nature of Chrome OS and What it Means For Windows

Disruptive technologies are new products or services that drastically change the situation in the market. Google’s Chrome OS can be seen as disruptive technology if we take a look at its features and the new ideas that it introduces in the operating system market.

Lets take a look at the graph bellow representing improvement to a disruptive technology during its evolution:

As more people adopt the disruptive technology, more developers concentrate their effort on bringing small incremental improvements or building products that are compatible to the disruptive technology. Therefore, the innovative product will gradually become more interesting than even high-end solutions. For Chrome OS, this is going to be a stronger cloud industry which could slowly replace all those client applications. This is already happening to a certain degree with Google Docs which is a cloud-based replacement of MS Office. Other applications will switch from the client-based architecture to the cloud-based architecture and we will soon see a browser-based version of Adobe CS4. When this will happen, those who will use the Chrome OS to work with spreadsheets or web design will be better of than those who use Windows + MS Office/Adobe CS4 because they will have their data file on the cloud. So when they work from different devices, they don’t have to spend their time synchronizing files from one device to another device.

With smartphone as the mainstream computing platform, the switch form the Big-OS to the Big-Browser seems unstoppable. This means that Chrome OS’ position will only get stronger in time and Windows’ position will only get weaker if it stays in its current form. Since Microsoft is not crazy enough to let its cash cow die without giving a fight, we can bet that Microsoft will do something about this situation. For example, Microsoft can start with working on a lighter version of Windows and, at the same time, build partnership with device manufacturers to deliver Windows-exclusive systems. Of course, building Windows-exclusive partnership is something Microsoft has done very successfully in the past. Another option would be to build partnership with key cloud solution providers to have exclusive compatibility with Windows and IE. Microsoft can itself become a key cloud supplier and offer a couple of killer-apps that will also be exclusively compatible with Windows. But one thing is sure, Microsoft has to do everything in its power to keep the same level of Windows revenue or else things are not going to look good.