Android Netbooks Coming; Google Unintentionally Competes with Own Chromebooks

[dgstorm]

A bit of news coming from DigiTimes suggests that soon ASUS, Samsung, Toshiba and Acer, are working to release Android based netbooks and notebooks. This will end up putting Google in the unenviable position of competing with itself in its Chromebook market. Although the cloud-based Chromebooks are technically a different animal than an Android OS based notebook, widespread popularity for the Android OS could end up hurting Google's bottom line with the Chromebooks. Google's vision of the future is that all mobile computing will eventually go cloud-based, but it would be ironic to find their own technology, namely Android, slowing the evolution toward that eventuality. Ultimately, the future may prove that Google was simply wise to "hedge their bets" and move in multiple directions. Only time will tell.

Source: ChromeForums.net via PhanDroid and DigiTimes

 

[Rrok007]

I thought about this the other day.. It occurs to me that Google could end up being more successful at running a dual OS model then Microsoft was. MS had the whole 9X family for consumers and the NT family for businesses.

I've heard that a lot of major corporations are starting to look at going back to the terminal/server model from long ago, especially now that virtual app technologies have started to progress and mature. This could work well for Google where they wouldn't really be competing with themselves, just competing better in different environments. The Chromebooks could work well for companies looking to run virtual apps and reduce their hardware budget. And if they're running Chromebooks instead of actual desktops, there whole organization becomes extremely mobile. They don't have to have actuall offices, just a data center, everyone works from home. If they did work from a central office, if there's any kind of disaster, just fold up your computer, relocate, and return to business as usual.

Android, on the otherhand, is familiar to everyone now cause of phones, and suits the consumer market rather well... there's even some degree of interconnect between the two it seems... so when you're not working on a Chomebook, you playing on Android...