Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management at Google blogged yesterday about Google’s operating system direction. This is very significant as it signals a continuation of Google’s web-centric, cloud-focused view of the world, putting Chrome at the center of the experience.
This will be extremely significant over the next three years as the PC industry continues to evolve rapidly from a Wintel x86 legacy to a lighter, Smartphone type of model where connectivity is the enabler. This piece of news deserves the level of alerts it is kicking off. Add in the other piece of significant Google news this week — the symbolic dropping of the beta designation from GMail and Docs, and the future becomes a lot more clear.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
via Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS.
Real users are still going to need a real os. The key here is the little fact most of us miss: a very high percentage of computers never do any real computing, they are simply internet browsers, email readers and electronic photo albums. They need to look good to do their primary tasks, but they don’t need 90% of the functionality built into a real computer.
That doesn’t mean that the Chrome OS won’t end up fully featured some day…
MS really needs to think about branding themselves as the OS that goes to work…it’d be the correct counter to the Apple ‘I’m a Mac’ ads, and it’d get them past this as well.
Of course they have no doubt countered with more than a few all day off site “blamestorms”.
The real news here is that Google decided to use its own blog to release the news (after the NY Times started calling around.)
Also — it’s not a prepared press release from corporate communications but a missive from someone actually involved in the process.