Google Aims Directly at Microsoft with Chrome OS

To be a fly on the wall at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley, Idaho, confab as always would be an interesting experience. However, this year's event, while potentially overshadowed by the G8 Summit, promises to be as exciting as ever, especially in light of the announcement from Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) that it will launch the Google Chrome OS, a new computer operating system squarely aimed at Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT) bread-and-butter Windows business.

As TechCrunch declared, "This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft."

As nuclear proliferation will be the talk of the G8, Google's new bomb will be the topic of the Sun Valley event -- likely eclipsing chatter about Twitter Inc. and Microsoft's pending Windows 7 release. In fact, it is clear that Google announced the launch of the Chrome OS to coincide with the Allen & Co. conference for the exact purpose of keeping itself in the limelight.

It certainly would be fun to observe any possible interaction between Microsoft's Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page in Idaho this week.

Meanwhile, bloggers across the Internet are patting themselves on the back for having successfully predicted the Google operating system. Ever since last year when the company launched its Chrome Web browser that competes with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Corp.'s open-source Firefox, industry observers, including TechCrunch, have been playing Nostradamus. The speculation turned out to be prescient as the description of the new OS matches almost exactly the rumored one.

Google will be retooling the software around its own light distribution of Linux intended to basically just run the Chrome Web browser rather than locally stored applications. In other words, all the Chrome OS applications would exist on the Internet -- think Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Calendar, etc.

Google's idea borrows from certain Linux distributions already in use. For example, Wal-Mart (WMT) briefly sold low-end computers using a version of Ubuntu Linux called gOS. While gOS included all the usual features of a full desktop Linux distribution, the gOS unlike most Linux installations featured links to Google Docs for word processing applications, Google Calendar in lieu of Sunbird (or for Windows natives Outlook) and other Google services.

The gOS distribution of Linux is not the only one that relies on Web services in place of locally stored applications. In fact, the idea is akin to Palm Inc.'s (NASDAQ:PALM) new phone operating system webOS found on the new Palm Pre.

Come to think of it, rather than waiting for Ballmer to wrestle with Page or Brin in Idaho, it might be worth keeping an eye out for Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting chummy with Palm's new CEO Jon Rubenstein (assuming he's one of the 270 executives invited). - Matthew Wurtzel