This makes a lot of sense to me. I could see a future where the "OS" is really just the browser and you do everything online (including file storage). So the "PC OS" would just be a tiny thing that boots up and allows you to run the browser of your choice. The browser has some standard technologies, like Java or whatever...and all functionality is written within that framework. It wouldn't be a very near future, but over the next 10-20 years, I could see personal computing moving in that direction (and being distributed more and more, into clothing, furniture, etc, so eventually there is no actual "personal computer," just ubiquitous computing).
cloud computing baby! everything is going to be web based....the need for powerhouse machines is no more! I was going to buy a netbook on woot lst night but decided against. don't think i can wait until the google os comes out though....should be good, basically with apps, etc.
The Google OS will probably be fine if all you do is surf the web and and do office documents. You can throw gaming out the window.
I work in IT and I think there is a place for almost every OS out there, it just matters what you are doing and what your needs are. I don't have anything against any operating system, the only thing I don't like to see is high prices. I think Microsoft is even coming around on that though, they are giving very cheap upgrades to windows 7 for folks this time around, with the upgrades being 1/3 the price of previous upgrades. Apples last upgrade I think was either 29 or 39 bucks, I can't remember. Linux is fine if it does what you want, but sometimes that can be hard. So use whatever you like. I tend to have a little of everything just because I like fargin around with stuff to see if I can get it to work and learn a little. There is even one company out there that might make it so you can game in every OS. They actually run the game on a back end server and just send the screen images to you over the internet. As long as they can pipe 60 fps, you can game on any computer because it doesn't have to do any graphics rendering. Pretty cool stuff.
I'm thinking CHROME is going to be free/open source. Are they building it on a Linux Platform? the only thing that might get fudgy is drivers and stuff for old devices.......that's what i'm thinking.......who knows. might be interesting, i'll probably go with Windows 7 if I had the choice though...although i suspect that CHROME will be kind of like their mobile phone browser with desktop aps and widgets all over the place and it being continously dependant on the net.
Remember this is just for netbooks, etc. Google doesn't want to piss off Mac too much with whom it has a loose alliance. Should be interesting though. Off-line apps are going to be interesting but should be helped by the new HTML 5 standard.
