Google Chrome OS

Google first announced its own operating system Chrome OS on July 7, 2009, with an intention to open more fronts against the rivals, Microsoft and Apple. We all have been using Windows since ages now. We have seen different versions of it coming over the years. In school days, we used to talk about DOS and Win 93 or 95 and today we see a new type of Windows all together. Google has become the god in web world. Google has helped us in finding almost all the answers we wanted. Now, the time has come when Google has made a major move and revealed a operating system, which has been designed exclusively to work with web applications.

The Chrome project coding was started n 2009 with a motive to cater to the needs of the people who are more into netbooks and mainly manage all their work online on their pockets laptops. Realizing this, Google wanted to create an OS which makes web activities, applications smoother than ever before. Design goals for Google Chrome OS's user interface include using minimal screen space by combining applications and standard Web pages into a single tab strip, rather than separating the two. Designers are considering a reduced window management scheme that would operate only in full-screen mode making it much easier to use. Till date, Microsoft dominates the usage share of desktop operating systems and the software market in word processing and spreadsheet applications. The operating system dominance may be challenged directly by Google Chrome OS, and the application dominance indirectly through a shift to cloud computing. According to an analysis by PC World, Google Chrome OS represents the next step in this battle. But Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos has noted that the two operating systems will not fully overlap in functionality. Users should be aware that Chrome OS hosted on a netbook is not intended as a substitute for Microsoft Windows running on a conventional laptop, which has the computational power to run a resource-intensive program like Photoshop.

Some critics have predicted the market failure of Chrome OS. Tony Bradley writing for PC World in November 2009 said: "We can already do most, if not all, of what Chrome OS promises to deliver. Using a Windows 7 or Linux-based netbook, users can simply not install anything but a web browser and connect to the vast array of Google products and other web-based services and applications. Netbooks have been successful at capturing the low-end PC market, and they provide a web-centric computing experience today. I am not sure why we should get excited that a year from now we'll be able to do the same thing, but locked into doing it from the fourth-place web browser.

Google launched its first Chrome OS Laptop, Cr-48 on Dec 7, 2010. Fresh out of the box, a Chrome notebook boots up in a few seconds. After connecting it to the Internet, you log in with a Google account and are pitched into the Chrome browser. At that point, the setup is over. Chrome OS is little more than Chrome the browser. Ultimately, though the core promise of Chrome OS is familiar: it's an attempt to deliver on a suite of ideas and concepts about cloud computing and the Web that have been circling for years. Schmidt in particular has been here before. In the late 90s, in a previous life as CTO of Sun Microsystems, he pushed the "Network Computer," a diskless notebook that relied on the cloud for everything. "Our instincts were right 20 years ago but our technology wasn't mature," he said today. "This time it does in fact work."