Apple has proven that you don’t have to win over the masses to build a profitable software/hardware ecosystem. It’s okay to be niche…as long as you cultivate a customer-base that is willing to pay a premium for advantages your niche platform brings compared to what Microsoft is offering. Apple is sitting at something like 10% of computer sales..and that’s perfectly okay…because its a profitable venture. Apple doesn’t have to be the dominate vendor.. they have a loyal following willing to pay cash for products and services that sustains the software and hardware development Apple does. More importantly that loyal customer based influences other people to _buy_ Apple’s products and services…something Canonical doesn’t have in its Ubuntu userbase.

Google revenue strategy is pretty obvious to figure out. Control a segment of the mobile operating system market and drive more people to their already profitable advertising dollar supported services like search. Google’s search revenue is their strength…and their operating system developments reinforce that strength as well as building outward from it into potentially new revenue areas. Google has a well understood profitable core business.

Canonical’s revenue strategy is far less clear as Canonical doesn’t have an existing revenue stream that can be called a strength. For Canonical…5 years into their business plan… everything they are doing still seems like an experiment.. there is no core business. Nothing has solidified as a revenue stream strong enough for them to build outward from. That’s a problem.

Whilst I agree that Chrome OS is unlikely to win over the Windows masses just yet, I suspect it will consolidate their hardcore users, giving them a netbook and a smart phone with which to consume Google services.

Chrome, however, may offer a better integration of services than the awful stuff Linpus and Xandros did, getting over the consumer’s distrust of change. Purchasers of Chrome netbooks will also likely already be big users of Google services, meaning that the applications they want WILL be available … through the Chrome browser.

I suspect that Chrome OS will raise the Linux tide and all Linux boats will rise because of that.

The cat definitely out of the bag. But you shouldn’t be surprised that most people haven’t noticed that fact. The alarm factor about data in the cloud maybe delayed…but its not necessarily out of place. It’s like boiling a frog by turning up the water temperature slowly. We’ve been slowly putting more and more of our data out in the cloud across multiple services without necessarily realizing the risks. Each service, by itself, doesn’t get noticed. Having google out there pontentially conciliating all those services and all our data under a single umbrella maybe a step too big for most people to ignore without finally noticing the discomfort.

I say, we take this opportunity to be as shrill as possible about potential privacy concerns in the cloud. Use Google’s size and reach as a pretext to start shedding light onto data privacy and data sharing practises that are already established industry standards. Practises nobody really wants to talk about. If we publicly hold up Google to their own “do no evil” corporate policy standard when it comes to safegaurding personal data, maybe we can drag the standard up for the rest of the industry as well. I think Google can take the scrutiny.

-jef