Johannes Beus
While it had been advertised for a while, Google premiered its Chrome OS to the public, for the first time yesterday. Based on a Linux-Kernel, Google introduced the general outline of an operating system that is supposed to show up mainly in netbooks and similar devices next year.
I just installed this OS in a virtual machine. To keep it short: I will give it a second glance once the first actual products with this pre-installed hit the market. For now, features are only integrated in the most basic fashion and much of it either does not work or only does so partially. Personally, I do not think this is much of a problem, seeing how this is “Google-style” but as we were able to see with Android and the Chrome browser, Google is extremely fast in making improvements to their systems.
I find the background story as to why Google is developing an operating system much more interesting than a review of the Chrome-OS-Beta version. While up to two years ago, Google was most of all a searchengine, now they are offering more and more applications: Google Apps is a great example for this. To get in touch with their customers directly, Google started to offer the layer in between them and their customers themselves. For the mobile market, this is Android, for the desktop/laptop, it is Chrome and Chrome OS. This puts Google in direct competition to the likes of Microsoft with their office-suite or Apple with their iPhone/App-store. And even though Google keeps telling everyone that they are only trying to satisfy their customers needs, I would not be surprised if this constellation will not cause some friction in the years to come.
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