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Good question. I am very sceptic, too. Also, Android's success is quite a problem for Chrome OS, IMHO. The OEMs are just getting familiar with Android right now, the flood of upcomming devices is right around the corner and consumers seem to like Android quite a bit with it's more traditional general purpose approach.

If Chrome OS can boot faster than Android, it'll have a right to exist. My HTC Desire needs more than 45 seconds to boot! with a 1 Ghz processor! That should be unacceptable for all engineers involved.

Thats including 10 seconds for that silly HTC video to play when the phone boots right?

If you mean the animation where the phone writes "HTC quietly brilliant" on the screen... yes. The animation has really nothing particular, it's rather mediocre.
Hopefully, something will be actually happening behind the scenes. Each time I wonder what could be so time-consuming in a stupid phone's boot process.

Well, it's easy to explain. Consider that DOS took around 30s to boot the hardware of the old days, and Windows 7 and Mac OS X still take about the same time on hardware that's thousands of time faster.

How is that possible ? Software bloat. At each new releases, the devs of modern operating systems aim for that 30s mark, arguing that if people don't complain about it enough it's just good enough. Good enough by good enough, they save a lot of development time in optimization, and it just works as long as hardware processing power is growing according to Moore's law...

Now, what happens when some manufacturer releases a new product based on old hardware, like a smartphone or a netbook, and tries to stick a desktop OS on top of it ? On that slower hardware, the wasted power hurts performance more than expected by the OS manufacturer. And we get 45s to 1min boot times, among other things like crappy battery life. Blame the hardware manufacturer for not putting a core i7 and a 4400 mAH/12.7V battery in the device.

The more I work on my OS, the more I'm horrified by how unnoticeable the performance impact of basic features now is. I'm growing more and more convinced that it's superfluous features that no one uses that are so much harming performance.

Sure but how often do you perform a cold boot? I stopped caring about boot times after sleep/resume came out.

For my laptop : every time I use it, except when I only leave it for less than an hour and don't have the time or the will to save my data.
For my phone : every morning.

Edited 2010-10-14 05:38 UTC

In fairness, modern boot sequences are doing a lot of useful work that DOS never did. For example, DOS just pulled the Centronics RESET pin low across all 3 printer ports (whether they existed or not ;-) for a few seconds and called the peripherals good, then stuck up a default mode 0 text screen with a prompt. Not that challenging, but then, with only 160k and a 4.77 MHz processor...

A modern OS walks the entire USB tree, validating and loading drivers dynamically as it goes, brings up one or more networks, dynamically configures video for the current set of monitors, loads a boatload of desktop extensions and configuration settings... It's not just "bloat", it's very useful work given a billion users with very different preferences, hardware and peripheral sets.

Of course, focusing effort on boot time (by moving some configuration into the background, for example) can result in much faster boot times. For example, the last two Ubuntu releases together cut my desktop boot times by a factor of three.

That said, I reboot my devices (phone to server) so rarely I don't particularly care. It's more of a first impression consideration - "wow, Ubuntu boots fast!" - than a real productivity boost.

then chrome os is what you want. At their presentation of chrome os they said that it will boot in less than 7 seconds

Secondary machines in the house for web browsing, tablets, public terminals, possibly generic office worker desks depending on what their tasks entail... It won't replace traditional OS setups for most, but it'll potentially have a nice niche supplementing them