Daring Fireball: Herd Mentality »

Great stuff from Gruber. But one thing that he only notes briefly in a footnote is Chrome OS. While the hoopla has largely died down around it as it remains mostly an enigma for the time being, I do still firmly believe that it may have the potential to alter the PC industry (that being the Windows PC industry).

Will it kill Windows? Of course not. Will it force most PC makers out of the herd mentality Gruber talks about? Probably not. But if one netbook with Chrome OS installed takes off in sales, which I have a suspicion we may see depending on the price point, it would very slowly start to shake things up.

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. And now I have the full version (booted on my MacBook Pro). It’s fine. Much better than Vista. But why do I even use it at all? Just to use Chrome (which is so much faster on Windows as the OS X version is still pre-beta). If I could just boot into Chrome (Chrome OS), I would in a second.

Most people aren’t ready for that yet, but a cheap Chrome OS netbook (call it a GoogleBook or a ChromeBook) could be a very interesting gateway drug away from the Windows stranglehold in the PC market at the low end.

And with Google pushing from the bottom, and Apple pushing from the top, Microsoft could start to feel squeezed.