BCS - Business Computing Solutions

In the current market for home computer systems there are three main operating system vendors, those being Windows, Mac and Linux. Looking at proportion of operating systems installed on home PC's by each vendor, figures would be about 95% Windows, 4% Mac and 1% Linux. This puts Windows with the biggest market share of operating system by far in most polls, which may make you wonder what all the fuss is about.

Microsoft's business has always been in closed source products which bring in instant revenue. Its expensive operating systems and office utilities have until very recently dominated the desktop PC without competition. The reason for this has been two-fold, first of all there have not been any good quality products until recently which could rival Microsoft's products and also, while this gap in the market has been left unfilled, users have found themselves with no option but to get aquainted with Microsoft's sometimes unstable products.

One of the first products to actually rival the Microsoft monopoly was the open source OpenOffice, originally acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999, as the closed source StarOffice, but in 2000 rebranded and opened up, as to provide competition with the otherwise closed market belonging to Microsoft. This now free and viable alternative office solution, available on all operating systems and boasting complete compatibility with Microsoft Office products, began to open the market up to the free solutions thereby releasing the monopoly that had been held so long. Today OpenOffice is available in 110 different languages and provides a stable office environment gaining an increasing user base.

In 2004 Mozilla's Firefox began to hit the market and now is the second biggest browser on the web. Originally a fork from the Netscape browser, this browser, currently at version 3.5, now claims 25% of the requests made on the web, and boasts ever increasing support for new open web standards such as HTML5. It's next minor version - 3.6 is at the time of writing available as a beta release, with the next full version, version 4.0, looking increasingly similar to Google Chrome!

So, how does Google fit into the mesh of open source and free software?

In the last few years as well as Google supporting other open source projects, through programs such as Google Summer of Code which began in 2005, the company has also embraced open source thinking through software it creates. Over very recent years not only has Google released cutting edge server and web applications, such as Google Wave, but it has also started to embraced the desktop and mobile computing platforms.

In October 2008 Google released its first operating system, named Android, which took the smart phone market by force. More and more phone manufacturers provided this Linux Open Source system with their devices, where previously the market was dominated by Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. As the system was built on Linux, the system is completely free to download and can be installed now on most mobile devices, owing to the ability for the underlying Linux components being about to natively run on nearly all modern computing devices.

Shortly after this attack on the Microsoft market, in July 2009 Google announced its biggest blow to the Microsoft camp, the announce of its operating system, Google Chrome OS, based on its new, but nevertheless established browser Google Chrome. Up until this point Google had only been getting close to its aim of "cloud computing", via its cross browser plugin, Google Gears. Cloud computing, a term to describe the rise of storing all things online and making them accessible anywhere no matter where you are. This would bring the end to operating systems as we know them, where disk space and processing power are the defining specifications for the usability of a machine. The ultimate point of cloud computing is to have all applications run off very powerful servers, therefore making the end-user's computer ultimately only responsible for displaying the computed content. Although the internet speed is growing this two part technology, known as Terminal Servers and Thin Clients, only works adequately through a local area network.

The main purpose of the Google Gears was to bring a compromise for users, allowing them to use other "Cloud" services that it and other companies provided, even if they do not have an internet connection, by download the core components and data of an online system to the computer and use this version when it could not connect. Google also released an API to this plugin to allow other websites to use its service to enhance their applications. 

Google Chrome OS, brought this Cloud Computing to the next step, whereby the operating system and the browser and indistinguishable from each other. Building on its sound reputation of the browser Google advertises the system as being able to boot instantly, building reputation of Google Chrome's fast handling of complex web pages due to its ability to natively compile javascript, as well as secure with complete cloud storage. This means that documents can be accessed on any PC connected to the web, or cloud with no need for backups.

Following this move by Google to bring the user straight to the web has forced Microsoft reluctantly to concede to bringing its awaited Office suit, Office 2010, to the web, also as a cloud technology as to try and compete with the rising success of Google Docs. It is yet to see how users will respond to this change in position within Microsoft. One thing that can be read from this decision is that Google is successfully showing the user the true power the internet has to offer.

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