Today, there was a leak of some confidential Microsoft documents that detailed an upcoming product that will directly compete with Chrome OS from Google. Meet Windows 10 S, a cloud based platform that is very similar to what is running on Chromebooks.
Apparently, Google has been making a killing in the K-12 Education sector where their Chromebooks have found the most usage. According to statistics, the OS covered 49% of the education sector by the end of 2016, that was up from the 40% they had in 2015. It is a remarkable achievement for a company that only had 9% market share in 2013. Just the other day we sang praises of the Lenovo Flex 11 that runs Chrome OS and it seems Microsoft have taken note of the rising tide of this cloud based platform.
On the Microsoft event scheduled on 2nd May, the company is planning to launch the Windows 10 S, it will be based on the creators update that they launched several days ago. The OS will run on very light specifications which include a quadcore Celeron or ARM CPU, a 4GB RAM, 32GB internal storage (64GB for a 64 bit processor) and a 10 hour Battery life. The heavy lifting will be done on the cloud by Microsoft servers and most of the content will be saved there as well.
In case you want to move to a full blown Windows experience, you can upgrade to Windows Home or Pro by purchasing an extra license.
Chrome OS still has the upper hand in terms of performance as you can see in the chart, it also has the ability to run android apps, which are now over a million of them. The leak suggests that Win 10 S will be running on Windows store apps which are just a fraction of what android offers. It is unclear if Microsoft will introduce new hardware to complement the new OS, that would have given them a boost especially if they price it as competitively as Chromebooks cost. Microsoft will need to really push this OS hard if they want to beat all the advances Google has made with its implementation, many analysts have predicted that Cloud based platforms are the future of computing; its very great to see some meaningful competition on them.