What an exciting few days. Yesterday Google decided to remove the beta tags from several of their products and now today they announce an OS. I was excited 9 months ago when Google announced they had a web browser. I also heard a few analysts who thought that this was a stepping stone for Google to enter the OS market. I agreed completly mostly because I thought that it would be important for Microsoft to have some competition.
Today it seems that those analysts were correct. Google Announced that they will be releasing a light weight open source operating system.
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.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
I like that last sentance. It should just work. In my opinion that is how most Google Products function. They just work and they work beautifully. Google does make a point to state that the new OS will be separate from Android. As a person with an Android phone, I hope this won’t cause Android to be left in the cold. If I know Google I think they will be able to handle both as both of these products offer a lot of promise.
You can read the full blog announcement here
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