I have become increasingly interested in what can only be described as the Windows XP effect. My previous two posts focussed on the idea that XP is, in the user's mind, the end of the upgrade journey and that even mighty Microsoft is struggling to budge them away from XP onto bigger and 'better' things.

I assert, and would expect little dissention, that change away from XP (voluntary change that is) wherein most users reside deep in their comfort zone, would need a really powerful driver. For arch conservative schools and public sector workplaces it will have to be a very good reason indeed.

This driving force will come from the Open Source community for one simple reason and that is here we find diversity. The winning strategy is lurking in the open source primordial soup waiting to reproduce rapidly and burst onto the scene we just don't know which it is yet. Corporate proprietary software programs, despite having access to huge talents and huge budgets, have 'strategic visions' and 'road-maps'. In short they plan and they fund accordingly; for them diversity is expensive, wasteful and often futile.

The Open Source community by virtue of its very core being has no plan!

Individual projects within the pantheon of Open Source software do of course have a plan. The OpenOffice project knows where it is going (for a while at least) as does, I presume, MySQL and even Java (is it Open Source now or not? I lose track). I have admittedly been a little disingenuous with my choices as all three above have one rather vast corporation in the background. Enterprise-level Open Source operating systems also have a plan just like any large corporate product, Novell's Suse and Red Hat Enterprise being obvious examples.

However, non-enterprise Open Source projects number in their thousands and reflect the interests and passions of their developer or group of developers. Projects start in one direction and may fork in another. Some die out others flourish. Taken in the round though no statement can be made about their 'direction'.

The above brings me to the point of this article, and that point the great corporation known as Google. Google has, as is well known, always fished in the Open Source pond. They have it seems followed a natural selection model assiduously. They feed the fish randomly it seems using their vast wealth and then select promising and sometimes unexpected products. As a result they now have a suite of very impressive online and offline applications the latest is the Open Source application, the browser called Chrome.

Google's Chrome Plated Genius

As discussed above, a driver for change will have to be found to wean off the XP users who after all are in the vast majority of computer users.

If it were to be a new computer to bring about change, this machine most manufacturers seem to agree, would be nicer looking, quieter, less power hungry, and a lot faster at everything than the machines they are asking the consumer to replace. I happen to think that the latter point is very significant and that Open Source software has the means to speed up computing. The basket of changes above may be enough to encourage users to move from XP and their old desktops but Google has had a better idea.

Chrome is a very fast browser as I suppose most readers know full well by now. Fast is obvious and desirable and a good enough reason to slip Chrome onto your Windows desktop, it only takes a few seconds. Don't be afraid.

But the real cleverness follows.

Chrome allows you to create menu icons for online applications which look and behave like regular apps, no sign of the browser shell. It is better to think of Chrome as a shell OS. Install Chrome on your user-comfort zone XP computer and let it take over. With a decent Internet connection you'll soon be using a faster machine that is really an Open Source computer sitting on top of a slave OS. Google have borrowed from biology again this time it's looking at the parasite strategy.

This parasite is smart too. Chrome helpfully tells Google (in confidence of course) what kind of things you like so it can be improved and because it is Open Source anyone can help improve it too. This is truly new. Chrome will rapidly evolve and adapt to its user, hosted by an increasing vestigial operating system. That is really clever, maybe I should have called the post 'Chrome eats Windows'. Chrome will put a shiny hard coat on rusting mild steel Windows, one day all that will be left is the coat.

As a strategy for change this I think is breathtaking. What then is left for Linux (or Mac) , does the same fate await Linux on the desktop? I think so, at least for the big beasts, all the computer will want is an ultra light, ultra fast operating system with a few choice offline applications that can sync with online when needed to. Maybe this is what happened to the dinosaurs.