What’s all the fuss about Google Chrome OS?

Last week Google showed off an early version of their upcoming Chrome OS. You can read about it in many places but CIO.com has a good summary.

Although it’s not supposed to be finished until the end of next year it’s already being talked about all over the place and will undoubtedly be influential far before it’s released.

Google is obviously a company that lives, breathes, and makes money off of the web. They want more of us to connect to the web with web browsers and spend more time online. They already have their own web browser called Google Chrome and now that’s extending to an operating system (OS).

Think of Google Chrome OS, I’m guessing a bit here, as if you boot up your computer and it goes straight into a web browser. In fact, as far as I can tell there’ll be nothing else but the browser. Sure, you can run applications as long as they are web applications. Sounds a bit like iPhone at first, right?

Your data will be stored in the “cloud”, meaning on servers somewhere on the Internet. Apparently Google Chrome OS will not even run from traditional hard drives, only from solid state drives (SSDs).

Presumably this new OS will run fast, will be efficient with power (long battery life on mobile equipment), and to users be simple, perhaps simplistic, to use. Some netbooks are already pretty inexpensive and perhaps something like this could help push down prices further. Yes, we can argue about whether the user experience is good or not on a netbook, but they are nonetheless extremely popular.

So part of the fuss is just simply because Google is doing it. Another part is that, although it’s not released yet, Google Chrome OS is in a way leapfrogging current desktop operating systems and moving quickly ahead to where they are going anyway. On my Mac I’m certainly living more in the cloud and doing more in a web browser. I think even if Google Chrome OS is still quite some time away it’s going to drive developments in many ways even before it’s out.