You’ve probably read/heard that yesterday Google held a press event on making the ChromeOS the’ve been working on an open source project. Actually they’ve announced ChromeOS back in July, but now that the source is available it is making more waves. This is a very logical move for Google, and even though I think that they will need to enable some local/offline capabilities before it would be a viable option.

As usual* for Google, they are not the first in this space (If you want to get a webbook today you can try out litl, which looks like a very nice,  or the GOS cloud on the Gigabyte M912)  - but Google’s size and position in the market makes this interesting for everybody.

Anyway, I am almost thinking about a career change to analyst as I’ve been says that’s what they’ve up to since they released Chrome in Sept. 2008. when I published Google Chrome -The browser is the new Desktop. Here’s an excerpt:

Now,in my opinion, Google makes a bold move to change the rules and re-define the playground - if webapss need to run on the desktop, let's make the browser the new desktop.
What makes me say that? because it is focused on application (see the comics),because the browser runs each tab in its own process, because it has a process monitor, because it is a link on the google home page...

From the chrome "OS" point of view we can look at javascript,HTML etc. as the IL (bytecode in java speak) on which the application run. This makes cross-compilers like GWT and the good side of MS Volta (vs. the bad side) the next abstraction layer. I expect these will be more significant in the future

On the same note, it is probably good time to provide a link to a presentation on the future of PCs I’ve created in 2007, which highlights some of the trends that are more apparent today in moving to the cloud

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* the most obvious example is of course search (altavista, hotbot etc. have all been there before..), a more recent example is the free GPS turn-by-turn where Waze (an Israeli company by they way) is already there but Google’s announcement is considered disruptive

 

A few weeks ago I blogged about Rich Internet applications (again) and how I think Google sees Chrome as an eventual desktop replacement.
Today I've seen that Good OS (makers of gOS - a Ubuntu based Linux distro) released a version they call gOS-Cloud.
This version doesn't have a desktop -only a browser (which looks like chrome). It also  offers a Mac OS X like dock in the browser.
This isn't the big thing yet, since despite the "g" it isn't a Google OS but it does look interesting.

 

A few weeks ago Google held a developer day here in Israel. Yesterday I got notice that the presentations and slides are now online (all the presentations are in English)

• I thought that the talk on AppEngine (by Jon McAlister) is worth watching - Google's offering in the cloud computing arena (some of the competition Azure is up against for you  MS buffs out there :) ).
• Thomas Steiner introduction to GWT 
  
• Chewy Trewhella talk about mushups (with examples of using Google's services)
  
• and event the Keynote is nice (starts around the 11th minute of the video) on opennesss and Google's offering