Education Law

Clash of the titans: Google v. Microsoft

Last week, Google effectively declared war on Microsoft by announcing the Google Chrome OS, its new operating system (OS) for personal computers. Everyone is still debating the ramifications and likely outcomes of such a move, and while the debate continues, people overlook the fact that this competition is a storied one. In fact, as Mashable writes: it?s become almost routine. 

For a good overview of where the battle now stands check out Mashable. In short, from search, to documents, to e-mail, Google and Microsoft have been competing for quite some time. The difference now is that Microsoft has dominated the operating system market for decades.

Sure, we’ve had the various Mac OS’s, Linux, Unix, etc., but these take up a small piece of the market altogether. Microsoft has reigned. And now they’re being challenged by an established corporation.

Moreover, they are attempting to rethink what an OS should be. To quote Google:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve. 

So what does this all mean for education. Good things BoardBuzz hopes. Schools are already looking at netbooks and cloud computing as solutions that can work and work well. If Google successfully creates a simple, efficient, and stable open-source (free) OS that even further unlocks the capabilities of netbooks, then great.

What do schools need in an OS as far as classroom use? As ZDNet reports:

Students need to get online (fast), take notes, write essays, blog, manage their social networks, email, etc. Our 1:1 implementation are largely focused on having students be able to write, communicate, collaborate, share and research anytime, anywhere. Guess what? A netbook that boots within seconds into a browser with immediate access to Google Apps would fill the bill quite handily.

Sounds good to BoardBuzz. Let the innovation begin.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on July 17, 2009 (boomark / email).