netbooks

New Google OS: Solidifying the cloud/SaaS partnership

Google is said to be announcing a new PC/netbook operating system today, a move that would make Google’s competition with Microsoft a very real thing and not just media hype. Rumors about the new OS are that it will be based on Google Chrome, the browser Google has already released, and in fact will be called Google Chrome OS.

We’re hearing that this is really a lightweight version of Android with a Chrome front-end, designed to be tightly coupled to online applications like Google Docs, Wave, Voice, etc. Chrome, the browser, is not a complete OS and would require some embedded background OS to work with and to adapt to various hardware designs; thus, the Android connection.

Our sources say that the big thrust of the new OS is to codify the SaaS/cloud partnership that Google wants to establish. In other words, it’s not about being a direct Windows competitor; it’s about extending the online paradigm where Google is already successful to the desktop via notebooks. The new OS will be available next year, though, and we expect that in the meantime, a lot of companies (including Palm) will be looking at porting their own smartphone OSS to netbooks.

Nokia’s migration of smartphone OSs to netbooks

Nokia is planning to release a netbook line based on Symbian, according to reports. The move is certainly a reaction to the Google plans to introduce netbooks based on Android.

The barriers to the use of a smartphone OS as the basis for a computer are less with netbooks because more of the usage is likely to be online, based on hosted applications or simple offline operation, than on general PC applications.

In theory, either Symbian or Android could be used on any hardware platform based on any reasonably flexible chipset. The Nokia move, coming after Google, could be a signal of a major shift in the computing space, something that could make life for Microsoft very difficult even given Windows 7, and something that will put considerable stress on Apple’s plans, particularly ifS teve Jobs does not return to the company later in the year.

Microsoft, whose Mobile version of Windows 7 is also due out next year, is rumored to be harboring netbook aspirations for the new OS as well, and some at Microsoft believe that a strong position in the netbook space, likely to create greater application developer support, would help them with smartphones.