It’s getting interesting:
The new operating system, announced late Tuesday night on Google’s Web site, will be based on the company’s nine-month-old Web browser, Chrome. Google intends to rely on help from the community of open-source programmers to develop the Chrome operating system, which is expected to begin running computers in the second half of 2010.
Like I’ve said for a while, all you need is “browser” and a low-level way to control physical compute resources local and remote.
Someone explain to me why I need Windows/OSX and all of it’s power if I’m hitting the same 10 “websites” (read: RIAs) over and over to write documents, email spreadsheets, edit and share photos, etc.?
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For a large portion of computer owners, I think ‘the cloud’ will be sufficient, but I think this GigaOm post makes a good case for why web apps might not be enough, drawing parallels to the SDK-less iPhone launch:
http://gigaom.com/2009/07/08/cue-the-outrage-google-follows-iphone-playbook-with-chrome-os/
“They were right, of course. Two years later, the fully SDK’d iPhone App Store has more than 50,000 apps that together have been downloaded more than a billion times. Web apps, then and now, are far from being the Next New Thing. And Google’s Chrome OS?”