3 ms·

One word: games. Consoles have really stepped it up, but a lot of people still use Windows at least partially because of hardware accelerated 3D gaming. I don

One word: games. Consoles have really stepped it up, but a lot of people still use Windows at least partially because of hardware accelerated 3D gaming. I don't see that being Google's netbook OS focus, or many people porting such things to web apps, obviously. Unless they have some secret alliance with OnLive ;-)

Xichekolas 17y ago
Exactly. DirectX has done almost as much, if not more, to preserve the Windows moat as MS Office has (moat in the sense that Warren Buffet says it). Many people buy Windows (or steal it) just to play games, just as many businesses stick with Windows because MS Office is the resume-standard office suite and VB apps are so easy to hammer out. Really it'd be nice if either a) game developers switched to OpenGL, or b) the open source community came up with something better than DirectX from the developer perspective, creating a natural impetus to switch. (Yes, I am being entirely selfish here, as I'd like to stop dual-booting for my non-Wine games.)
warfangle 17y ago
The market for casual online flash (and now, with V8, pure JavaScript/Canvas) games is much larger than the general 3D-accelerated PC game market.
- rksprst 17y ago
  But which market pays for its games?
  - sketerpot 17y ago
    Does it matter, from Google's point of view? A customer is a customer, whether or not they pay for games.
nwatson 17y ago
Google has the O3D API, browser-based access to 3D graphics, presumably hardware-accelerated for machines that have it. http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/. 3D in the browser will be viable in a few years.