For Great Justice

Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle

Two bits of news from Google.

First, nobody thought MJ would ever die, but even less people thought Gmail and similar Google services would ever get out of beta. Guess again, Hell has frozen over, . They state in the article that they planted the ‘Beta’ tag on it to indicate it’s constantly under development, but (as you can imagine), companies were reluctant to use it - ‘Beta’ usually means ‘Possibly riddled with critical bugs - use at your own risk’, and you don’t want to take risks when all your company communciation goes through Beta apps. Not that they didn’t use it, mind - according to Google itself, 1.75 million companies are using Google’s apps. My previous employer / internship, Oberon Interactive, used Gmail (’For Your Domain‘) as their main mail client, and I’d do the exact same.
Second, they’ve (finally) announced their web-based operating system. As expected, it seems to focus on web applications and such - which basically seems to make it a shell around a webbrowser of sorts. This project is developed separately from their mobile OS Android, although both are based on the Linux kernel. But where Android uses Java for the most part, the ‘Google Chrome Operating System’ will use ‘web technologies’ - i.e. webapps for all of its functionality.

The latter is a tad odd, one would think - what if you don’t have innernet access? What about WoW!11 3D video games? Well, for the former, there’s Google Gears and other offline tools, that allow one to run a webapp without an internet connection. For the latter, there’s projects like O3D (also by Google) to chuck a proper 3D engine API in a browser.

They say the OS will be released somewhere next year. Making it a Linux version that is mainly a browser would severely reduce development time, so that makes sense.

Still though, I personally would’ve preferred they re-invented the entire thing instead of reusing the 30 year old Linux base and such. It would be moast win if they would be able to make an operating system that ran Windows programs as well as Linux programs, but I doubt that’ll happen anytime soon - the React OS, for example, as well as the Wine project have both been going on for many years, and whilst they do get some results, neither is a full alternative to Windows yet.

For the OS though, I’m sure it’ll quickly become equally or even more popular than Linux, especially on netbooks - Google indicated they are already ‘working with multiple OEMs’, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if GCOS (?) was supplied on new netbooks by next year. The main advantage Google has over all the other netbook / linux operating systems is that it’s got the name and reputation, not to mention the financial means and marketing. I’m surely intrigued.

…But I doubt it’ll be the Windows killer everyone’s been waiting for.

UPDATE, 9 July: Google published a list of partners they’re working with. The list contains, amongst others, the names of Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. With those, Google has a number of large netbook manufacturers, as well as an ARM processor manufacturer. Dell seems to be missing on the list, even though they’ve been working with Android (supposedly). The list isn’t definitive though, more companies may be added as time passes.

The blog post also confirms that the OS will be free and open source - although not yet. The blog says that the OS will be open sourced later this year.

Tags: chrome, gmail, google, operating system