Microsoft beware: Will a Google OS power netbooks?

Android is Linux, so your

Android is Linux, so your first sentence doesn't make sense.

Full Fledged vs Stripped Down OS

I don't think it really matters what Google does on the netbook front. Let's not forget that this is round two as far as netbooks (mini-notebooks) are concerned.

When PDAs started to grow into handhelds, you had devices like the Jornada 820 and the NEC MobilePro, as well as Symbian's own netbook plus a few others.

These systems ran stripped down OSes forcing users to connect to their desktops to sync files. The interest in netbooks today is that you have full-blown Operating Systems performing what most general consumers need done without the ball-and-chain that is the desktop - true portability.

Android becomes a factor when it can deliver what XP/Vista, MAC, GNU/Linux and *BSD delivers - full-fledged applications - a ton of them.

When Android is ready for the desktop, they'll be ready for netbooks - the cloud isn't here yet...

Bad news for those wanting to laugh at Linux

It doesn't matter what Google wants to brand the OS as. Its built on Linux and they have never been shy about making it known that its built on Linux. WebOS is built on Linux and even though Palm doesn't say much about that....its still Linux.

Now the consumer won't know and doesn't care. In fact the only reason I think some people know distros like Fedora and Ubuntu are Linux is because the ant-Linux crowd is always spreading FUD about how they won't work because they are Linux.

You can call it whatever you want but MS will still be competing with Linux plain and simple even if its Google's version of it just as they are competing with BSD in OS X. Nobody cares what its called. The technical ramifications will remain the same (increased adoption meaning better driver support and software) If anything I'm looking for the Linux community to adopt a trend that Google may have set in place with the UI stack of Android. If Google starts picking up alot of mainstream software I imagine Linux distros may start making the modifications needed to run that software. Its just Java basically.

Android and Linux?

I'm confused by the start of this article. Last time I checked, Android's kernel is Linux. Did the author mean that Microsoft's biggest competitor may not be GNU/Linux?

Could the author please clarify what is meant by:

"Microsoft's biggest operating system competitor may not be Apple or Linux. Instead, a possible Google operating system based on its Android OS"

wow

"Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld, and the author of more than 35 books, including "How the Internet Works," "Windows XP Hacks," and "Windows Vista in a Nutshell." He has written about technology for more than 20 years, and has published in numerous national magazines and newspapers, ranging from Computerworld to USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, and CIO Magazine. This is a weblog of Preston Gralla. The opinions expressed are those of Preston Gralla and may not represent those of Computerworld.", and ...

wow

No clue

a possible Google operating system based on its Android OS.

You mean Adroid as in a linux based mobile phone OS? And you dare say that:

PRODUCT_POLICY
android.policy_phone
android.policy_mid

Might mean that they've taken mid hardware (aka netbooks) in mind? Shocking!! Next you will say that Google and Canonical will elaborate in making an 'internet-os' for the desktop as well! Could it be?

The operating system was an internally developed Google one.

uhm, you mean the so called 'Goobuntu' a modified version of Ubuntu? Man, that is *hot* news!!

As for John, same subject applies:

Apple's OSX is based upon Darwin.

look in wikipedia:

Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000
So Darwin is already an Apple release, you must mean they took some freeBSD code, and nobody is calling it BSD? True, just as Microsoft isn't calling Windows BSD because they took the tcp/ip stack from BSD? Apple and Microsoft using BSD code is very different from Google taking the Linux kernel, since that is GPLed code which can't be relicensed like BSD code. They can however market their distribution and they are doing a great job at it. But in the end, it is yald (Yet Another Linux Distribution).

Do your homework, both of you, please...

sincerely,

Willem

Not Linux?

You said "Microsoft's biggest operating system competitor may not be Apple or Linux. Instead, a possible Google operating system based on its Android OS..."

Problem: Google's Android OS is based on a Linux kernel and many existing open source libraries, along with some new ones Google has added.

So how is this not Linux? It sounds to me like it is indeed another GNU/Linux distribution, this one being from Google. So it sounds to me like you should have said "Microsoft's biggest operating system competitor may indeed be GNU/Linux!" And Google will be competing against some established netbook Linux players.