Interesting developments on the desktop front these days. First Google Chrome turns from browser platform to Operating System, something I guessed would happen nearly a year ago. Chrome differs from Android in that it is designed for computers like netbook users who want to quickly boot to the web, not smart phones where Android will run. From the official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Google rolls out the Chrome OS to us mortals in late 2010.

But as Google strikes at the heart of Microsoft’s business, the Microsoft empire has struck back. Recently Microsoft announced it is releasing a free version of its Office Web product. Competitively, this is interesting on a number of levels:

1) Office Web, unlike the Google Apps Premium product which costs $50 USD per year, will be free to licensed customers like TRU;

2) The portability created by supporting the legacy of Microsoft document types. For as long as I can remember, the MS-Office file types (XLS, DOC, MDB, PPT etc) have been the de facto standard for productivity documents, and;

3) Office Web can be hosted either internally or externally. This will simplify the decision to deploy Office Web now our own data centre, versus having to bet the farm on Cloud versions of the software.

I’ll be interested to see if Office Web has the same document sharing strengths of Google Docs and the level of integration with Active Directory.

Anyone else thinking that Google may be the new Microsoft?

This just in. I love youtube. But is the youtube business model really sustainable? I’ve heard conflicting reports but my understanding is that the bandwidth costs alone of youtube exceed $1 million/day. That doesn’t include the cost of servers and the petabytes of storage required for all those videos.

I’m probably not alone in saying that few people click through the ads in youtube or facebook. Twitter doesn’t have any ads to click on. But youtube and twitter are really great things. Perhaps in the future they will need to be funded like public television? Just a thought…

Even the heavyweight pundits of all things Web 2.n are weighing in on the debate. Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Tipping Point etc.) thinks that the free model in practice is unsustainable whereas Chris Anderson (The Long Tail, Free: The Future of Radical Price) thinks that content will remain free. While Anderson’s book is on my reading list at first glance I’d have to side with Gladwell on this one. I remember talk 10 years ago in the dot com boom that business models that had actual revenues and profits were obsolete. I don’t buy that. I’m not even convinced about the validity of Anderson’s concept of “Long Tail Ecomomics.” Most people the world over frequent only the same handful of sites each day (see Alexa.com)  Heck because of the Internet, it would appear that people are choosing from a pool of fewer and fewer names for their babies.

And free or not free, youngsters aren’t even using facebook as much as they used to as facebook’s drop in growth rates in the high school and college cohorts shows: