Why doesn't Google make a free, compatible Windows clone, for the same reasons Microsoft as well as Google made free, compatible browser clones? I honestly don't understand it.
Why would they? It would cost billions, take years and mostly consist of dead-end features which Windows keeps around for compatibility. The end result would be an almost worthless product which always trails behind Windows and which MS can dominate with their existing software. It would also massively increase the market for "real" MS Windows.
Don't extend your competitors platform. Chrome took IE users and made them Chrome users because Google's platform is the web, not the desktop. So Chrome has been pushing forward traditional desktop features such as offline, OpenGL, and sockets, to displace desktop software.
Look at what Apple has done with the iPad, they've been the market leader and MS has had to follow them, only recently shipping Office apps for iOS. They're blazing ahead with their own platform which serves their goals, not tired old legacy software from 30 years ago.
Because that's an enourmous amount of work and likely to attract hostile legal action? They didn't even create their own operating system for their phones.
Why then does MS work on Bing? Bing is more likely to infringe on Google's patents than a Windows clone is likely to infringe on MS's patents, not? And Bing is certainly lots of work.
Hardly a replacement for Office. They're good to collaborate and work with people over long distances, but when documents grow to not so big sizes, problems begin. I even have problems to load 30 page documents. Word 2016 flies on Windows 8 and 10, and it takes 60-100 MiB of RAM.
Also, there are countless document templates (which plague different work fields) that are utterly incompatible with Google Docs and break all over.
I suspect that Google's view is that the local Operating System is decreasing in importance over time.
They might argue that we're spending more time in web applications, rather than purely in native desktop apps - This is reflected in their Chromebook offering, which largely strips away the non-web experience.
