there is some pretty crazy, almost hysterical, stuff coming out in the wake of Google’s Chrome OS source code release/preview. I got a good laugh (along with most readers, if the comments are any indication) over Randall Kennedy’s “Why Chrome OS will fail — Big Time” (Scoble, incidentally, concisely illustrates what Kennedy, and many critics, miss, although he doesn’t point out the irrelevancy of the argument in the first place) and scratched my head at Mary Jo Foley’s speculation that Silverlight might dampen Chrome adoption.

One of the craziest things I have seen, though, is a claim reported in eWeek made by IDC’s Al Hilwa that Chrome OS will be a consumer phenomena inside of five years, but it will take ten years before Chrome OS can capture 5% of the enterprise computing market. That’s outlandish in so many respects you almost have to imagine Hilwa was misquoted. for one thing, what operating system lasts for ten years in the first place? in ten years, we’ll probably be looking at something else entirely, which may be a distant descendant of Chrome, but will almost certainly be entirely revised with technologies we haven’t even fully imagined yet. for another, when it comes to netbooks or other small, personal technology devices, how do you even draw the line these days? I don’t see how you can imagine something that integral will be popular with staff and not make it into their place of business. The iPhone hasn’t been wildly popular with enterprise IT departments, either, but enterprise penetration is already estimated at 13% and if you don’t think it’s been spreading like wildfire you haven’t been looking around the elevator in your office tower much lately. I think it’s clear that the days when the IT department drove these decisions are pretty much over.

Granted, Google is not Apple, but almost all these articles miss the real point, and the real point of comparison between the iPhone and Chrome. The iPhone has achieved spectacular adoption numbers not simply because it’s Apple, not because Steve Jobs waved a wand at it. in some ways, in fact, it has succeeded despite these things; by traditional mobile standards, it has neither great battery life, reception, nor sound quality. it has succeeded, instead, because it filled an empty niche in the mobile phone market for a powerful, useable device providing handheld Internet access. The Internet access isn’t even all that great… but it’s far and away better than anyone else was offering, mostly because no one else seemed to have the economic incentives to do so.

Chrome OS is positioned to fill the same sort of gap in existing offerings. you can argue that it’s not polished or sexy and that Google has a poor track record of follow-through on some projects, and you would be right. you could also say it won’t replace a desktop computer, and in some ways, you’d be right about that, too. You’d also be missing the point. there is a gap out there. it happens that Google currently has the most incentive to fill that gap and Chrome OS has more to do with that fact than some benighted goal of unseating Microsoft or dominating enterprise computing; Google benefits when people use the web. SaaS adoption pushes people online and money into Google’s coffers. And SaaS adoption is already skyrocketing; enterprise penetration as of 2008 (the most recent numbers I have to hand) was at 16%, up a third from the prior year and with nearly half of remaining organizations planning to adopt… is anyone going to bet that dropped this year as layoffs accelerated and infrastructure maintenance budgets evaporated?

The thing is, like mobile phone browsing before it, all this is happening on top of particularly ill-suited platforms. Modern browsers have evolved slowly from simple programs designed to display simple, static HTML markup. The hodge-podge of add-ons and work-arounds that have been driven by web application designers are barely adequate, unstable, and often insecure. The modern browser, in short, is a poor platform for web applications. It’s a miracle they work as well as they do and a clear sign of their utility that they are as widely adopted as they are. Google hasn’t hidden this problem, or motivation, from anyone, though many seem to be ignoring it. The company feels as if its own prospects are hindered by a lack of platforms that allow its services to expand to their demand potential. since no one else has an incentive to do so, they’re attempting to remedy the problem themselves.

But it’s not just their problem, of course; it’s a problem for any SaaS provider, and it is a problem for their legions of existing customers, who are putting up with some frankly less-than-ideal experiences as it is to use what they have decided are useful products. It’s ironic that many of those attacking Chrome, or defending desktop computing, will point to this state of affairs as evidence supporting their point, but not realize that it is exactly this state of affairs that Chrome OS is designed to change.

So I would argue that none of this is really about Google, or Chrome OS, but instead about the market and its demands. if you don’t think that people will eagerly adopt devices that make it easier, faster, and safer to access the information and tools they already rely on, you’ve been ignoring the entire history of information technology. Chrome OS may not prove to be such a device; it’s far too early to say. But if not Google, someone out there is going to find a way to fill this gap, and they will succeed.