Institute For The Future

Google vs. Apple, Round 2 or: Can I Get That on a Netbook?

The rise of the netbook has made its way into traditional print media - a strong indicator that the trend toward low cost, cloud-reliant computing has firmly taken root in American consumer behavior. <break>The increasing reliance on stripped-down machines that are built to make use of the massive, and growing, number of internet-only applications (for example, the google application suite, Flickr, and Sumo Paint, among others), has in turn created an interesting challenge for hardware manufacturers. Loading a bloated operating system on an otherwise slimmed down system is counter productive, and as a result manufacturers such as surging Acer are thinking up new ways to squeeze every last drop of speed out of their technology.

 

An interesting development in this field is recent moves towards convergence of the operating systems smartphones and laptops. With "growing similarities between smartphones and laptops [that] play directly to Acer’s strengths" as a low-cost manufacturer, the Taiwanese company has signaled its intentions to move into the cellphone market. Even more significant is Acer's plans for the first netbook to natively run Google's Android. In a CNet article on the upcoming Acer/Android collaboration, Acer's president of IT product, Jim Wong, is quoted as writing :"Netbooks are designed to be compact in size and easy to connect to the Internet wherever you go .... The Android operating system offers incredibly fast wireless connection to the internet; for this reason, Acer has decided to develop Android Netbooks for added convenience to our customers." Having a light-weight, blisteringly fast computer that runs the latest Microsoft offering is one thing; having a streamlined machine designed for the web that runs an OS that is designed for the web is something that I think will make a lot more sense to the average consumer.

 

Apple, you may have heard, has its own OS that was designed for interaction with web-based apps in mind. With months of furious speculation about the company's plans for the netbook market, the possibilit of the smartphone war jumping to personal computing is very real. With its upcoming release of Snow Leopard, Apple is slimming down the size of its OS while decreasing application loading times -- exactly the kind of changes needed to the mac OS for it to compete with an android-based netbook. Granted this might not signal the rise of the Apple notebook, but it does indicate that after years of unchecked growth, operating systems are beginning address the fact that personal computing is increasingly taking place on the web, and that consumers need personal computers that reflect this shift.