Chinese whispers hint at early Chrome OS release

Google has remained enigmatically silent on internet rumours that the company’s Chrome OS could imminently arrive on some Chinese netbooks. Instead Mountain View has reaffirmed that it’s on course to shove its new operating system out the door in the second half of next year. “We announced that we'd be releasing the code in …

[Anonymous Coward]

oh dear....

so what we realy need is another os to take up a little more market share....that will no doubt fail....

i cant see where another os will fit into the market...

Windows = mainstream.... everyone knows how to use it.. plenty of apps...

Linux = nerds.... lets face it, its for those who like to fiddle inder the bonnet... and i dont care what you say, it will never replace windows as a standard desktop... it had a good run on netbooks, but everyone deletes it now and puts windows on ....

Mac os = for the enlightened ones.... or the ones who think they are the chosen ones... the ones who defend the os and the company to the death, just because they got conned into paying a stupid premium price for standard hardwarewraped in silver paper to make it look special...

google chrome os = hmm i'll try it before i reinstall windows....

[Martin 6]

oh dear

People care about the OS on their netbook about as much as they care about the OS running their phone or their in car GPS.

The reason it isn't going to catch on is that MS will have a little word with the supplier and point out that if they ship a machine with Chrome they will pay twice the price for OEM copies of Windows on their other machines.

Similairly all the netbook makers will have a word with their MS sales guy and say they are thinking about moving all their netbooks to chrome for the Chinese market if the OEM price of Windows7 netbook edition doest come down a few $

[Henry Wertz 1]

Loongson is MIPS

"and i dont care what you say, it will never replace windows as a standard desktop"

And I don't care what YOU say, I think it will at least give it a run for it's money.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant -- OSX and Windows do not run on MIPS. Loongson CPU is a MIPS variant (it's MIPS with like 1 instruction missing to avoid a patent fee). They are aiming for the TRUE netbook market, i.e. make it as cheap and light on the battery as possible (as opposed to the current netbook market, where Microsoft pretty much killed it off by saying "Oh just a little more RAM, just a little faster processor please" until costs shot up and they became merely small notebooks.)

Windows is memory-hungry, CPU-hungry, and non-portable* (Win7, I give credit for cutting Vista down to size but it's still bigger than XP. And XP is bigger than most Linux distros. Newer distros, both netbook and mainstream, are slimming down even further than they already are, in terms of lower CPU usage, lower memory consumption, and faster boot times. Chrome will run OK on a 200mhz ARM.) Other CPUs (particularly ARM) are becoming plenty fast enough to run a netbook while using less power and costing less than even Atom, allowing for an even cooler running machine with even longer battery life (or same battery life with even lighter battery). In addition, when targetting a $200 or so machine, a $100 or so OS license is rather inappropriate. As much as Microsoft may want this market they have no product appropriate for it.

*I know in theory Windows NT kernel is portable, but in practice it isn't particularly. The only port right now is to Itanium, and it has tons of features stripped out -- last I heard it couldn't even print.

[Lewis Mettler 1]

MS employee as AC?

Funny that someone who does not want the Chrome OS to exist has to waste their time claiming that the product is not needed. It clearly is.

Microsoft charge far too much for its OS. And, if a customer really only needs a browser and cloud related services there is no need for any OS at all. Except on the technical level.

So if Google wants to put out a Chome version that does not need an OS at all consumers can benefit enourmously. To the tune of hundreds of dollars to be precise.

Only an idiot would claim that someone else's product is unneeded. Either that or someone that is paid by Microsoft to say so.

No one individual needs to buy the Chrome OS if they don't want to. Just like no one individual needs to buy a Chevy if they do not want to. But, only idiots claim that Chevy should somehow not be producing cars.

[asdf]

almost Lewis

>But, only idiots claim that Chevy should somehow not be producing cars.

I agree totally with your point but your analogy kind of sucks. There is a strong argument to be made that Government Motors should not be making the crap overpriced unreliable chevys. After all quality aside should Chevy be making cars if it is going to take tax payer money from now on to do so (ie company can't make a profit). The American car companies have only lasted so long because they were basically banks that also happened to make crap cars that they could only sell by giving credit to anyone with pulse (how they really made their money was on the credit). Once the credit meltdown happened the end was nigh. Perhaps you should pick another product that actually is well made and doesn't require tax money to exist.

[Anonymous Coward]

@henry wertz

Windows is pretty portable, it has run on many architectures, including mips in the past, but generally is only run on x86/64 intel and AMD, i386 and Itanium architectures at the moment. That doesn't mean to say that if mips or ARM become popular it won't get ported PDQ. The whole point of NT, from the start, was that it wasn't tied to any one architecture, there just isn't any call for it on other architectures at the moment. Indeed - to make sure it was fully portable the original dev work wasn't carried out on i386 so that they could be sure no machine specific code was included.

[CorruptedShadows]

@Anonymous Coward

"so what we realy need is another os to take up a little more market share....that will no doubt fail....

i cant see where another os will fit into the market..."

Why do you care so much about the market share unless you are one of the competitors in it?

"Windows = mainstream.... everyone knows how to use it.. plenty of apps..."

Everyone barely knows how to use it. Do you know how many people come up to me asking me how to do this & how to do that? People really don't need half the features windows puts in it's OS if all they want to do is check email play solitair and go Myspace/Facebooking. Too expensive for what most people want to use a computer for

"Linux = nerds.... lets face it, its for those who like to fiddle inder the bonnet... and i dont care what you say, it will never replace windows as a standard desktop... it had a good run on netbooks, but everyone deletes it now and puts windows on ...."

That's funny you mention that, Linux is used on many servers around the globe, it is a FREE alternative to Windows and there are distros user friendly enough to where people can become comfortable using them. For those who delete a linux preinstalled distro on a netbook are just stupid and giving up battery life and performance to something that hogs. I take it you are such a idiot

"Mac os = for the enlightened ones.... or the ones who think they are the chosen ones... the ones who defend the os and the company to the death, just because they got conned into paying a stupid premium price for standard hardwarewraped in silver paper to make it look special..."

Remember all that crap you just talked about Linux, Mac's are also unix based OS's just like Linux. Yes they are proprietary and overpriced average hardware but whatever leave that to the fanboi's to argue with you over. I have rarely used Mac OS so I don't have proper background to say anything about it just yet

"google chrome os = hmm i'll try it before i reinstall windows...."

The reason you'll try it is because deep down inside you are still looking for a cheaper better performing OS to run other than MIcrosoft Products.

My end point who cares if Google comes out with it's own OS, it came out with it's own Browser which is fairly successful when you look at the market of browsers. It exceeds any good thing you can even say about Internet Explorer (Assuming you can think of a good thing to say about it) and even gives Firefox a run for it's money. Most people I deal with either have Chrome or Firefox installed. The only people who I know who still use IE are those who don't know better and corperate networks with their security policies in place and even they are still trying to migrate away from IE. I believe Chromes OS should be fairly successful like their browser. When Chrome the browser was first released it instantly snapped up 0.32% of the market. It has done nothing but grow since then. It's been out for nearly a year and it is already at 3% market. The one thing standing between Chrome & Firefox (who has 23% or more of the browser market) is Apple Safari. Chrome so far is a windows Exclusive browser until their apple & linux versions hit. Firefox & Safari as well as IE are all multi platform hence their high market shares. When Chrome becomes available for Linux & Apple machines I expect it to over take Safari and start catching up with Firefox. then one day Firefox & Chrome will have a combined market share that outweighs IE all together. But Time will tell I could be wrong. Then again you'll just reinstall windows and go back to your malware driveby downloads wont you LoL

[Goat Jam]

@Fraser

Windows may have been portable when NT was first released but those days are long gone.