Five Reasons Farhad Manjoo is Doomed

All right, maybe he's not doomed, but once again I'm less than impressed with Slate's technology columnist, Farhad Manjoo, who says today that
Google's Chrome OS is doomed.

His article starts out by admitting that Google's Chrome OS (which I'll abbreviate GCOS, even if that name has been used before) is intended, at least initially, for Netbooks.

Nevertheless, his first point ("Linux is hard to love") complains that it's hard to install software on Linux and that Linux doesn't have much hardware peripheral support.

Of course, partnering with hardware manufacturers should address immediate peripheral support; the only other hardware most people want on a netbook is 802.11 support, CDMA or GSM wireless cards from various providers, and maybe an external mouse, if decadence is the order of the day.

His second point ("We aren't ready to run everything on the Web") is exactly why GCOS is being first targeted at Netbooks. They're called Netbooks for a reason: most folks aren't running Microsoft Office on these little boxes.

It's true that we aren't ready to run everything on the Web just yet. But Google isn't shipping GCOS on everything just yet, either.

His third and fourth reasons ("Microsoft is a formidable opponent" and "Google fails often") are true. But they apply equally to every product those vendors ship. If Manjoo was writing about the Zune, would he say that Apple is doomed? Unlikely—even if Microsoft shipped a great product. Does Manjoo think that Google Mail is doomed now that it's left beta? Of course not.

Really, points three and four are just puffery to stretch the whole article out to five points. Readers like lists. Well, editors do, anyway. And readers certainly click on top ten, five reasons. But I'm not sure that readers are more satisfied after having clicked through, given the frequent poor analysis of the lists.

Manjoo's final point claims that "The Chrome OS makes no business sense," because they're giving it away for free. His central claim in this section is that it's "a wasteful customer acquisition expense": it's better for Google to spend more money improving their advertising engine than to branch out into new areas.

Correctly, he notes that the primary point of Chrome OS from a business sense "is to screw with Microsoft." I think that's defensive: every dollar that Microsoft spends chasing the notebook market and protecting their desktop franchise is a dollar they're not spending on Bing. Which I haven't tried, but I hear is pretty good. So by attacking Microsoft, they're protecting their core franchise. (I doubt that Google's Web search improvements are hampered by pouring resources into GCOS.)

Within his "no business sense" claim, Farhad Manjoo also suggests that GCOS as customer acquisition is unnecessarily expensive because Gmail and Google Docs can run from Windows. The cost of customer acquisition may be high—but the customer defection rate of users back to Microsoft Office would be infinitely lower on an operating system that doesn't run office.

Really, though, whether Manjoo is right or wrong is beside the point. In a prior life, I wrote a column about computer security. My job, distilled to its most vaporous essence, was to be controversial, and attract readers; whether I was right or wrong was beside the point, as far as the bottom line was concerned. And make no mistake, attracting readers and clicks was the real objective. The content that did so was secondary.

Thus blogging about Manjoo's article helps accomplish his real goal: being controversial enough to attract readers. I'm torn between a cynical acceptance of that answer—which would push me to stop reading the damn articles, since they're worthless from an analytical perspective—and a utopian wish that higher-quality analysis would attract more readers, and be more valuable than "top five reasons X is doomed" journalism.

But how many of you clicked on this article because of its title?