San Francisco — As Microsoft makes a bang with its "Bing" against Google in Internet search, Redmond now finds the tables turned in the PC operating system business. Google Inc is preparing to launch an operating system for personal computers next year, the move marks Google’s most direct challenge yet at the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows OS, which is the world’s most widely used operating system.
The company announced Google Chrome OS on its blog Tuesday night, and said that lower-end PCs called Netbooks from unnamed manufacturers will include it in the second half of 2010.
"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks," Google said in its announcement. Linux will run under the covers of the open-source project, but the applications will run on the Web itself. In other words, Google’s cloud-computing ambitions just got a lot bigger.
"Google Chrome OS is being developed for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small Netbooks to full-size desktop systems," Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, said in the blog post.
"Because we are already discussing with partners about the project, and we will soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."
Google has already developed one operating system called "Android," which is targeted at mobile phones, and which itself is expected to be used in some netbooks. The company said the two are separate projects.
"Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android," the company said on the blog post. "Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks."
"All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies," Pichai, said in a Google blog.
With Google Chrome OS, the company anticipates to begin afresh with personal computing.
"The operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no Web," the blog post said. "So today, we are announcing a new project that is a natural extension of Google Chrome–the Google Chrome Operating System. It is our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."
Among the benefits that Google explained are "Speed, Simplicity and Security,". "The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web," the company reports. "And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users do not have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."
"Any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet," Upson and Pichai said.
The company said the software will work on both x86 and ARM chips.