Putting Chrome OS in Context
Drudge led off the week with the headline: “DOMINATE: GOOG PLOTS DEATH BLOW TO MSFT!” The actual story is a little less sensational: Google’s planning on turning their browser into an operating system all its own. While media outlets basically ran with Drudge’s take (all-out tech war!), John Gruber collected what we actually know and tried to connect the dots with a clear head.
So it’s not weird that Chrome was announced. But what is weird is how it was announced. And, despite the title of the weblog post in which the announcement was made — “Introducing the Google Chrome OS” — nothing has actually been introduced. There aren’t even any screenshots, let alone a demo or any specific technical information.
Chrome OS, from what’s described, seems like a thin wrapper around existing web technologies. That’s not to say “mobile”, specifically, but light enough to go anywhere, taking advantage of the fact that most web experiences do most of their work server-side. But since Google already offers a mobile OS — Android — it only makes sense to ask how those systems (and hardware, and experiences, and development) will be similar, and how they’ll differ. So the announcement is interesting, but it’s mostly hints and speculation so far.
From: Daring Fireball: Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context
posted by Dan Nordquist on July 12th, 2009 at 11:35 am Permanent link to this post
One Response to “Putting Chrome OS in Context”
From what I’ve read, Google is currently unsure exactly what the relationship of Chrome OS to Android will be. The main collision point seems to be the long-rumored Google/HP(?) netbooks.
Personally, I don’t see the huge OS civil war that some people are predicting at Google. It isn’t unheard of for a company to have 2 products that are somewhat similar. Both Chrome OS & Android are built on the idea of ubiquitous network identity and an assumption of a preference for Google products.
Where they differ is in the computing context that they are being developed for. Chrome OS is still very much built around the desktop metaphor. Android is about mobility. It just so happens that these contexts are put at odds when it comes to netbooks.