In 2008 Google made its first foray into the operating system market when they launched the Android Operating System, a Linux and Java based OS targeted at the smartphone market. No doubt Microsoft sat up and took notice as a new threat emerged against it’s Windows Mobile OS in addition to Apple with its iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry
This week Google google announced plans to move further into the OS space with its Chrome operating system which will be targeted at more full-featured devices such as netbooks and laptops. The announcement over at the Google blog is fairly light on technical details but lays out the vision very clearly. Google will bring to market a no fuss operating system designed specifically for the web and web based applications, it will run on low cost devices with either ARM or x86/64 CPU’s and will be coming to market in 2010.
Whilst such an approach is not going to please everyone there is no doubt a substantial market for such devices, a point not lost on hardware manufacturers Acer, ASUS, Freescal, HP, Lenovo, Qualcomm, TI and Toshiba who have been outed as supporting Googles foray into system software. Adobe too have been working with Google, presumably so that their Flash and Acroread plugins run well on the platform.
It is great to see another entry into this segment of the market which is dominated by the Windows OS which takes a huge 87% market share with its nearest competitor being Apples Mac OS at 10%.
Posted by Ché Kristo 
Posted by Ché Kristo 
Posted by Ché Kristo 