Running BI on Chrome OS

The Google Chrome operating system would basically be a browser and some drivers to connect to the underlying hardware. It would be the realization of Marc Andreessen's dream in the 90s reducing Windows to a device driver.

It only make sense for a client. The idea would be to run programs with a Web client that don't require any local installation. That way it doesn't matter what the underlying system actually is.

Google has been pushing HTML 5 pretty hard, and Chrome OS is a good reason to. For example, HTML 5 has a tag to show vidoes, which means you would need a plugin. That means shifting the burden to the browser itself. The more the browser does the more viable the Chrome OS idea is.

It's notable that a lot of BI tools would work on Chrome. For example, a lot of the sprawling Information Builders would work fine, as would MicroStrategy -- they run on DHTML. So would Business Objects WebI, which is Java based. I'm guessing Java will work. Cognos would have some issues because some of the studios require ActiveX.

And so on. I'm not attempting to do a complete survey here, just point out that BI vendors have already done quite a bit for Web support, and ultimately, a Web strategy is a Windows-free strategy.