Technocentral

The rumour mill has been doing the rounds for a long while, ever since Google took it upon itself to dip it’s toe into the water with it’s Android mobile platform which aimed itself directly at the iPhone OS and the Google chrome Browser which saw it attempt to (so far unsuccessfully) take on the behemoth that is Microsoft Internet Explorer (Google have always claimed that they are not trying to push it’s way into Firefox’s market share)

But today came a (shock?) announcement that Google are indeed working on a full blown, dedicated, open source operating system to work on PC architecture (x86) as well as Arm processors. Predictably, the Tweeters have been having a field day with this news even to the point of announcing the death of Windows….

But look at googles announcement more crafeully at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html and you see some telling comments, the main one being:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.”

From this, we can assume that this will not be initally targetted at the windows or OSX market, while netbooks originally came pre-installed with Linux, the customer base generally preferred to work with Windows and for this reason, the majority are now purchased with Windows pre-installed. Where linux is pre-installed this is usually a vendor specific, cut down version.

Google have obviously looked at the netbook market and decided that they can tap into this by producing a cheap (free?) operating system which will have the brand awarness of Google that people feel they can trust (theres another blog post waiting to happen with the Google trust thing!).

Expect a very lightweight OS with Google branding,  a simple but speedy interface and a lot of cloud computing applications (such as office tools, email, productivity software) as well as online file stores where you will be able to retrieve your documents from anywhere on any computer. It’s also highly likely that this new Google Chrome OS will be based on Linux.

What will be interesting is if Google follow the android route and implement a solid multi-touch touchscreen and gestures API into the core of the code and can persuade netbook manufacturers to include the hardware

I will be very interested to watch and play with this new OS when the Alphas and Betas come out,  but just don’t expect it to be a windows killer… at least not until windows kills itself!