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The company announced Google Chrome OS on its blog Tuesday night, saying lower-end PCs called Netbooks from unnamed manufacturers will include it in the second half of 2010. 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 created 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.

Google’s Strengths
This paragraph from Google’s announcement helps clarify what Google is building into this operating system:

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome (Google Chrome) browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

Essentially, Google Chrome OS aims to solve problems associated with Windows, primarily that it’s a bloated operating system that isn’t built for a computing world based on the web. To do this, Google Chrome will run within a windowing system on top of a Linux (linux) kernel. This means that web applications will work immediately on this operating system.

Google has always been known for its minimalist interfaces, its lightweight products, its web savvy, and the sheer speed of its products. It intends to take its vast knowledge and strengths and port them over into the OS market.

Can Google Beat Microsoft?

While there are a lot of questions we want answers to, one matters the most: Can Google OS take on Windows? Any OS that wants to manage desktop computers clearly competes with Windows. So far, nobody has been able to make major inroads (although Apple recently achieved 10 percent market share) in a space that Microsoft has dominated for years.

Yet Google has been the one company to present a serious challenge to Microsoft to-date, especially on the Web. Microsoft’s attempts to compete with Google in search have been fruitless overall. And while we don’t know how Bing (bing) will do, few people believe it will ultimately change the fact that Google is synonymous to search, just as Windows is synonymous to the OS.

We’ve said time and time again that competition is a good thing, and Microsoft hasn’t faced serious competition in the OS market in a long, long time. The question is whether or not Google Chrome OS will squash or be squashed by Windows.