How a little WINE lets Google top Microsoft at their own game

Recently, there have been an awful lot of people speculating about Google's new product: Google Chrome OS. This has been a product which has been talked about in hushed circles for some time and, like everything else Google does, there has been very little said from the company on the subject until the recent press release. They've slated a release for it, according to their blog, for 2010 and, if my suspicions are correct, this will mean the end of Microsoft and I would like to explain why.

On its own, a Google OS is not really a big threat to Microsoft. Yet another Linux distribution without anything special about it would really just dilute the entire landscape of Linux operating systems - yet another flavour of the system to add to distrowatch. However, Google aren't just any old company: they recruit solely the pinnacle of all engineering staff: I've had a look recently at their research arm. They have hundreds of peer-reviewed publications covering a vast array of subjects (see Research Papers for yourself) and people have come to expect something rather special from this knowledge and technology behemoth.

One of Google's best aspects is taking something very ordinary and, through the application of a little ingenuity, produce something truly remarkable. Mail is a wonderful example of this: look at every webmail solution except this and you will see a fat, bloated web application heavy with advertising, slow and often difficult or unintuitive to use. Gmail, by contrast, is incredibly lightweight: the development team created an entire Javascript framework in order to make it fast and efficient and thus was born Google Gears.

So now you're probably wondering what is so significant about Google's OS? What is the Joker card in the pack that is making Microsoft so very, very scared. Well, the timing is perfect because the companion software for Google's OS recently reached its 1.0 release. That software is WINE. This application is an absolute killer; it is, on its own a pinnacle piece of engineering that has been brushed to one side by major technologists for some time, until now.

The acronym standard for WINE Is Not an Emulator. Instead, it is an entirely open-source set of libraries and binary interfaces that allows Windows programs to run, fully functioning, on Linux without a virtual machine. Not everything in the Windows world is supported though, and the project maintains an applications database that allows people to find out what will work with WINE before taking the risk and installing software. After all, good businesses employ due dilligence, which means doing your research to make the most informed choice possible. With the current version of WINE, you can run Google OS (or indeed any supported flavour of Linux) and install most of the common applications you use on Windows but without the cost of a Windows license and, because of the way WINE has been developed, Microsoft cannot stop them.

One point that's worth looking at is the investment Google is making into WINE. Google are putting serious resources into the project and it only takes a quick glance at their code contribution list for WINE to see just how much effort Google are putting in, over time - approximately 425 patches in between 2006 and 2008. (Thanks to Roberto Usai for pointing this out).

So why does this scare Microsoft? Why is Google so special? The answer is all about trust. Who would you trust more? A company whos products are always in the news for their security breaches and who continue to churn out products, year after year, which aren't (on the surface) that innovative or a company whos very existence is founded on the easy access to knowledge and whos commercial arm was a spin-off of their search engine, whos adverts are unintrusive because Google realised that if you're subtle, it actually works better than a flashing banner.

Even this, though, does not spell the end for Microsoft. That is, until you look at their financials. According to their financial report for 2007, their company revenue comes primarily from two streams: their Windows division and their Business division, meaning Office. To understand what this means, think about this scenario:

Google launch Google OS in 2010, for free, and it runs all major Microsoft Windows software.

Support will be available for a nominal charge for home users, with a higher cost for business users. Recent advances in the Samba software suite, brought forward by the European Union anti-trust lawsuit, in which Microsoft agreed to license their intellectual property and open their SMB protocol allows an open-source implementation of the Microsoft domain management system, including Active Directory, which is key to so many businesses, small and large alike.

Microsoft are doomed because their entire business model is built upon making profit from effectively re-selling the same re-skinned operating system over and over again. When Windows NT was released, it was an amazing product: NT stood for New Technology, because it was a complete re-work from the operating system kernel up. Since then, every version of Windows, including (to the best of my knowledge) Vista has been built of the Windows NT kernel, or a version of it. If you were to look in your the Registry of your Windows machine, you will still see signs that NT is still there. They try to hide it, but it's there.

Ironically, Microsoft had a real chance to win this war some time ago, when Vista launched. When it was originally announced, it was to be a technical marvel. It had some features of truly awe-inspiring imagination, specifically WinFS - an entirely new filesystem which worked a bit like a database. Engineering and scheduling problems forced them to drop this and it still isn't back. This could have changed their fortunes entirely, but instead they continue to struggle to deliver solutions that are clean and reliable and are often shamed by massively public failures such as the Blue Screen of Death during the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony.

Unfortunately for Microsoft the reason for this and, in my understanding, most of these problems stem from the way their built their core Visual C++ and Visual Basic libraries and how people are still developing using very old technology that still, many years on, contains unhandled memory leaks.

So, in my opinion and, on the basis of the evidence, Microsoft is doomed. Le roi est moi, vive le roi.