The Google OS is Coming By Year's End

The Google OS is Coming By Year's End - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

What do you think?

I welcome it. Competition is always good and I biased in favor of and "ix" based OS. It will make a nice VM to play with at any rate. Thanks for the post Colonel Panic.
-Dave

I'll believe it when I see it.

Interesting idea and seems like a logical step for Google. It's definitely not unthinkable. As the writer said, Google has a lot of brand power and they're making inroads with Android and Chrome.

Should this eventuate another battle for Windows 7 looming?

They already have thier own OS: Android. If they do something for the desktop, it will probably be based off of Android.

If it's true, Eric Schmidt should not be sitting on Apple's board.

What I find interesting is that Android is just another Linux variant. So, in essence, it STARTED OUT as a desktop OS, that was later customized to run on a mobile phone. Making Linux practical on a device for which it was never designed to run on certainly takes time and effort. But translating those enhancements back to a full desktop OS should be fairly simple.

So, what then? Google has their own Linux distro... whoop-dee-doo, so does everyone else and their brother. What's worse for the Linux community as a whole is that this introduces yet another major player into the fold. So, now you have Google competing for the same space as Canonical, Novell, RedHat and others. The Linux community is already competing against itself, more competition makes it even worse.

This is yet another example of Linux's greatest strength also being its greatest weakness. When you have unending variety, there are no standards.

Well I agree with the above. And also there'd be compatibility issues between the various linux distros. An app would have to be tested on each distro. Where as on something like OS X, it works on 10.4, it'll work on 10.5 and beyond. Just one test, one time.

And personally I don't think Google is out to make a industry standard in anything. I think their way is to take existing ideas, like satellite maps and them use them to make google earth or take linux and make their own distro for it to be used in some weird and wacky way. They are just showing us all an idea is not stuck in one way or application or use. Innovation in versatility is Google.

looks interesting, maybe worth a muck around in VmWare however i highly doubt it would become my day to day OS..... i love my Mac OS

cwa107 said:

Making Linux practical on a device for which it was never designed to run on certainly takes time and effort. But translating those enhancements back to a full desktop OS should be fairly simple.

Click to expand...

I've never gone any further than compiling my own kernel but I can imagine it might be difficult. What is Android now has been built specifically to work with particular hardware and built to have a low footprint. I don't actually know Android well enough but I would assume that the OS is Linux cut down. Adding parts back in while making it feasible may not be that easy. Imagine all the phone specific parts that are probably built right into the code?

My $0.02. I could be way off the mark.

Google with an OS? Can anyone say embedded advertising!

Mac_OS said:

looks interesting, maybe worth a muck around in VmWare however i highly doubt it would become my day to day OS..... i love my Mac OS

Click to expand...

I just remembered this but you can download the Android SDK and it comes with an emulator. You can therefore test drive Google's already developed OS.

I think microsoft have more to be worried about than Apple.

an4rew said:

I think microsoft have more to be worried about than Apple.

Click to expand...

If Google did develop their own desktop OS and utilized the "Google hype machine" to move it, it could very well be a threat to Apple as well. If Google could position itself as a legitimate alternative and one that could be deployed on cheap hardware, Google could do serious damage to the hold that MS and Apple essentially have on the consumer market.

That said, I don't see this happening. Look at Chrome - while a decent browser, it's not exactly "flying off the shelves" so to speak. The OS market is a whole new challenge and not one that I think Google can hold their own in. If they base it off of Linux, they have to address the challenges that Linux faces in widespread adoption (there are many and I won't list them for the sake of brevity). As a long time Linux user, I very much see it remaining a niche OS in terms of consumer uptake (corporate uptake is a different issue). If Google decided to go their own route, they would face even more challenges and would likely fail miserably.

So, in gist, this is probably one market that Google should sit out. They could probably make a really good Linux distro but what would this really do for both Google and Linux? They have the resources and the capital to tackle a project like this but could a Google OS be feasible in a market already dominated by a few operating systems? If people realize that Windows programs don't work on it, how long are they going to support it?

If they took this on, I would support it (I like alternative options). While I would like to see diversity in the market, I don't see it lasting long. In fact, I'm surprised Google did Android.

Now if they made a version of the OS that was totally online. Well more like stored the information totally in the cloud above our heads, that'd be really nice. So no matter computer you used you could access your information. Like all the apps and your save information in the cloud. And you just use your immediate data in the computer's ram. And each save was to the cloud and not a HD.

And instead of buying each app on a CD/DVD. You just pay a small 1 time fee for access to it in the cloud.

To me that'd be the ultimate net book. Just enough HD space as a SSD drive for the basic OS and all the rest (even your music, movies etc) all in the cloud. But that's a little off topic.

As google is an internet based company to me that would be the logical step for an OS from them. If they actually do this or not is anyone's best guess.

I think it'll just be another *nix OS like all the other Linux distros out there. Which is a shame. As they have the potential here to make something revolutionary.

an4rew said:

I think microsoft have more to be worried about than Apple.

Click to expand...

funny thing, way back when, microsoft was thought the better that they did not associate with the hardware where apple was into both. how things turn.

I must admit, I never heard about this before?

Google OS? I guess it is time to google it a bit...

but when i look at it, its not such a bad idea, Microsoft should worry about this, Google is not some xy company from Neverland...

Google and Mac OS will probably become the two main operating systems eventually killing off Microsoft and perhaps Google will push a cloud system