The ultimate dogfood taste test challenge

A thought occurred to me yesterday whilst engaged in a bit of geeky sarcasm on Twitter (what was I supposed to do? Someone wrote that they love their Mac so much they'd pay twice the price for half the machine. I pointed out they already have. I know. I need to get out more…)

Google as an organisation pride themselves on "dogfooding" – using their own products extensively internally before inflicting them on outside customers (and from a phrase I've never understood… Who eats their own dogfood?). Google also as an organisation seems to be mostly powered by Mac computers (on people's desktops at least).

This week's announcements about the launch of ChromeOS plant an organisational change iceberg of Titanic-sinking proportions in the path of the good ship Google. A set of sparkly, shiny consumer devices that people are willing to publicly proclaim that they are willing to pay four times over the odds for, versus the world's most uninteresting (in a really interesting way) operating system.

What you buy with Apple isn't a computer. It's a cool, laid back, Californian lifestyle promise, where the world is tastefully lit and impeccably dressed. As I heard one commentator say this week, Apple is the exception that proves the rule that Silicon Valley doesn't do cool. Now all that panache costs significant marketing and design dollars, and that is what you pay for with Apple. And as iPhone 4 showed earlier this year, it doesn't even need to work very well and people will still flock to by it.

Square that off against the latest of what is essentially the latest iteration of thin client computing, and I see some significant change pain (or lots of people who suddenly need two devices). Twice in my career I have been responsible for moving people from Apple to another vendor… In the early 90s from System 7 to Windows 3.11 machines, and then last year from iPhone to BlackBerry. In neither case did I make myself very popular. I watch what happens at Google with interest.