Today, as I opened my FriendFeed, I was astonished as I read, via Rob Diana, the announcement that Google will build a “Chrome OS”, geared initially to netbook users who mostly run web applications.
If you read through the official press release and skip over the marketing parts of it, you’ll come to a paragraph that sums it up for me:
While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.
Why does Google need to offer two Operating Systems? Why not make an Android “light” and a full Android.
There might be technical reasons that make sense for them having two, but here I’m thinking about the users; most of them don’t even know what OS means, and to compete with Apple and Microsoft, you should really put your full force behind one project and not dilute yourself in two.
Chrome is already gaining acceptance as a browser. If you want to upgrade it to something, I’d say keep it as a client running on top of something else. But introducing another OS when Android is still struggling sounds like a bad idea.
Louis Gray and ReadWriteWeb talk about the new OS as well. Sarah Perez and The Apple Blog talk about it as well.
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