Google wants share of operating system market
Jul/09Comments
Now I’m convinced – Google truly does want to take over the world. It’s only a matter of time before the search engine giant starts manufacturing smart weapons for the military. In their latest iteration of computing dominance, they are putting together an operating system, called Google Chrome OS, that essentially works entirely online.
One of many Google logos
“Operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” wrote Google in their official announcement of Chrome OS. “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.”
Instead of the operating system controlling your computing environment like they do now, Chrome OS will act purely as a means to connect to the Internet, and your network access will provide the majority of the computing power and resources that you’ll need to interact with software products. For example, forget Microsoft Office and instead use Google Docs, which is a web-based word processing and spreadsheet application available through Google’s servers.
Google says the operating system will be offered for free, and they’re partnering with major hardware and software manufacturers like Asus, Adobe and Hewlett Packard to provide support for popular technologies. The code will be completely open-source, and Google is encouraging developers to take an active role in extending the new operating system’s capabilities after it is released later in the year.
The first Chrome OS release will target the netbook platform and Google hopes to offer the new operating system to consumers with netbooks late in 2010.
This will prove very interesting to watch as Google Chrome OS competes with many Linux distributions in providing a light-weight operating system that’s based on network access for the majority of its computing power. There will soon come a time where almost every computer will be using Google software – in one way or another.
