Google have announced Google Chrome OS. This is interesting on several fronts.

Firstly, and most obviously, this is an open statement of war on Microsoft. It is written in the text of the announcement "We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better." This device will have no MS APIs on it. None. Nada. The end of the MS lock in.

But that's just a cover story. We all knew MS lost quite some time ago. They are just collecting monopoly rent on the dying market while they try and figure out what to do next. In fact, MS are doing quite interesting research into programming languages, and I expect a resurgent Microsoft within a couple of years based on their C# 4 tooling and concurrency aware environments.

No, the real target is much more interesting. The key phrase of this announcement is that they are releasing a full OS stack for hardware vendors with zero per unit costs. The target here is Adobe. Either adobe ships flash player embedded for free, and loses money hand over fist on the codecs, or they don't ship flash player embedded for free, and Google serves YouTube using the HTML5 video codec and Adobe loses their market dominance in Flash to HTML5.

Classical pincer move.

The interesting thing is players who may wind up being casualties are the embedded device providers, specifically Nokia and Apple. The embedded device players who are asking for this from Google are the cut price device manufacturers in China, and they don't have the ability to write their own user interfaces. Nokia and Apple do. But, with this, the chinese manufacturers get to open the user interface building the the whole world of web developers.

So, Adobe are going to bleed. Nokia and Apple need to smarten up their game on embedded device programming. Fun times. =)

Originally posted by Brett Morgan