This week we’ve seen a number of Chrome-related announcements including new Chromebooks, the Chromebit, a revamped Google Now-style UI, and a Google tool that makes it easier to test out Android apps on Chrome OS. It’s pretty obvious that Google has big ambitions for Chrome OS, and 2015 might be the biggest year for the platform yet. But exactly how big will things get for the cloud-centric OS?

For this week’s Friday Debate, we discuss Chromebook’s potential for mainstream success, and what Google needs to do to make it appeal to even more users. Could Chrome OS every become a dominant force in the PC industry? Should Google merge its Chrome OS and Android efforts under one roof?

We’ll first start by hearing from a few AA team members, and then we invite you to participate in the poll below, and sound off in the comments. Also remember that the Friday Debate Podcast should be coming later this evening, or sometime over the weekend.

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Gary Sims

I must admit that when I first heard about Chrome OS, back in 2009, I really didn’t think it was a good idea. However, that all changed when I got my first Chromebook a couple of years ago. Although I was skeptical at first, my Chromebook has become my main productivity device when I am away from home, especially when I am travelling and covering events for Android Authority. At home I still use my PC, but the point is that for everything except editing video or images, I basically use Chrome.

But Chrome OS isn’t yet perfect. Google is obviously experimenting with different aspects of the Chrome OS architecture. There is already some basic support for running Android apps on Chrome OS, and now Google has announced Chromebit. What does this all mean?

The biggest problem with Chrome OS is that all the apps need to be written in HTML5. Without getting into too much detail here, HTML5 has its drawbacks. In 2012, Facebook abandoned the HTML5 version of its mobile app and rebuilt it as a native app. The reason? Speed.

Organisationally Android and Chrome OS are part of the same group within Google. What Google needs to do is add full Android support to Chrome OS, while retaining the Chrome OS UI and approach.

The result will be a true alternative to Windows and OS X. In one sense it will be the vindication of Linux on the desktop. At the core of both Chrome OS and Android is Linux, but the problem with Linux is its diversity. There are too many desktop options, too many SDKs, too many UI libraries. Diversity is good, diversity allows dreamers to dreams and hackers to hack. But in the real world diversity isn’t called diversity, it is called fragmentation. And fragmentation is the death of any ecosystem.

If Google can produce a version of Chrome OS which allows traditional apps to be written via the Android SDK, while maintaining its core principles then Linux could become the dominant laptop OS over Windows and OS X. Why? Because it will be free. It will use a different business model, which doesn’t rely on licenses for revenue and it will be build around the way we work today, not the way we worked back in the 1990s.

So where does Chromebit come into all this. Simple, the more accessible Google can make Chrome OS, the more people will use it. The more people use it, the more the ecosystem will thrive. The more the ecosystem thrives, the more accessible it becomes. And so on.

However, for businesses the problem with a cloud-centric OS is really the word “cloud” means “someone else’s servers.” No organization should store its intellectual property on “someone else’s servers.” And that is where Google will need to work, to strike the balance between its vision to be the world’s largest provider of cloud services and the need of corporates to keep their data on their own servers.

Jimmy Westenberg