Gillian Shaw
Sun
It could be a clash of the titans.
Google, a dominant force in the web world with a long-term vision of converting software users to applications delivered online, announced Wednesday it is launching its own computer operating system, Google Chrome OS.
The new operating system, initially to be focused on the exploding netbook market, not only takes on Microsoft in the OS market but also advances Google’s challenge of Microsoft’s domination in corporate office productivity software.
The announcement of Chrome OS comes nine months after Google launched its Chrome browser, which it says is regularly used now by more than 30 million web surfers. In an announcement on the company blog, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice-president of product management and Linus Upson, its engineering director, said the new OS was Google’s “attempt to rethink what operating systems should be.”
The post points out that the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in a pre-web era. Google promises a new, utopian-era OS in which viruses disappear and long waits for systems to crank up are a thing of the past.
“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” Pichai and Upson say in the post. “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.”
Chrome OS is to be an open-source operating system that Google describes as “lightweight.” The company said it will open-source its code later this year and netbooks with the new operating system will be available in the second half of 2010.
“For application developers, the web is the platform,” the post said. “All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favourite web technologies.
“And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux, thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.”
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