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Rumors spread yesterday about how Google was going to make a “Chrome Operating System”. Of course there have been rumors of a Google OS for years now. In early 2006, Ars reported on Google’s denial that it was prepping an OS distribution of its own based on Ubuntu. More recently, the (relative) ease of porting Android to netbooks led to plenty of speculation that Google’s full computer OS, when it appeared, would be based on Android. It turns out that’s not the case… it’s NOT going to be Android (though Google won’t preclude third-party adopters from using Android).

Last night at 9:00pm Google’s official blog raised the flag indicating Google was getting into the OS race. So what is the OS? It’s being Google Chrome OS and the operating system will center on Google Chrome and be targeted for netbooks (initially). It will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. While speculation was wild a few days ago about a Chrome OS, what wasn’t understood was how Chrome, a browser, could BE an OS…. a browser isn’t actually an operating system, what about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. It turns out Google is cranking out a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel – welp, that solves issues about drivers and such.

So what’s the intention here? Google intends that the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using existing web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform. If you do a lot in the cloud now then as TechCrunch put it “Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.”

The timing of this couldn’t be any more bitter sweet for Microsoft. Windows 7 RTM lands next week with the full release for October. I have to wonder if Google was trying to take a bit of wind out of Microsoft’s sails since on of the things touted was how well Windows 7 runs on netbooks. The Google Chrome OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010 – not that far behind the release of Windows 7.

Does this spell the end of Microsoft Windows? I’d say don’t count them out yet. Chrome OS will be new and will essentially require cloud computing. Sure, for most things I could get by on that, and as the web gets faster, HTML 5 hits, etc we will be able to do more and more in the cloud. In addition to the Microsoft has been developing “Gazelle” as an alternative to Internet Explorer. The browser acts like a self-contained operating system (sounds like Chrome OS) and is designed to address the fact that browsers like IE and Chrome have not been built by design to handle multiple processes and web applications in a secure manner. The browser relies on a “browser kernel” (5,000 lines of C# code) that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC’s underlying operating system. Built by the Microsoft Research team, company officials have been dropping hints that they are ready to talk more about Gazelle recently – perhaps as the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Google’s official blog post on Google Chrome OS

Firefox 3.5 can tell websites where you’re located so you can find info that’s more relevant and more useful.

Microsoft’s just-announced Live Mesh platform is, as most things out of Redmond these days are, a complex offering that can be difficult to understand with the company’s typical marketing-speak and software-plus-services buzzwords. So what the heck is Live Mesh?

Microsoft’s new Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is the mastermind behind Live Mesh and it’s been in development for two years. Live Mesh, if successful, could change the way PCs and other devices interact with Internet services and each other. Microsoft wants data and applications to be accessible from anywhere — online and off — using any device. When Ozzie came on board many assumed it was because, while Microsoft wouldn’t admit it at the time, the focus of your computing will be moving away from a single centralized desktop. Ozzie was going to bring true “cloud computing” to Redmond.

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As stated before Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft has just opened up their community website which includes a getting started video and downloads for the Silverlight runtimes, Visual Studio ’Orcas’ beta 1, Expression Blend 2 preview, Expression Media Encoder preview, Expression Design, as well as the Silverlight SDK’s. They also have a couple QuickStarts to get your going.

Silverlight.net

Apparently the softies hit the ball outta the park at Mix07 this year. Early indications, aka the buzz on the net, are that finally Microsoft did “get it”. Microsoft’s history works kinda like this: let somebody come up with a good idea, let them test it in the marketplace, take that idea and come out with a version 1.0 Microsoft flavor, it sucks donkey balls until about version 3.0 and then they destroy the market. They did it with Windows, they did it in the word processor /office suite space, most everybody I know, myself included, now uses Microsoft Messenger (or Live Messenger or whatever they call it nowadays) and have ditched ICQ/AOL/etc. If they don’t use MSIM alone, then they use something like Trillian. Lately they’ve been trying to catch up with Google in search, MySpace in social networking, and now Adobe with Flash. Here’s some hightlights from liveside.net:

• Silverlight is cross-platform, running equally well on Safari or Firefox on a Mac as Firefox on a PC, and of course on IE.
• A single 4mb download that installs in less than 20 seconds is all you need to run Silverlight content.
• Silverlight is a .Net technology, meaning that developers can write web applications in C#, VB.Net, Python, Ruby, or other languages of choice.
• Since it’s .Net and compiled, Silverlight will run somewhere between “300 to 1000 times faster” than an AJAX  web application.
• Silverlight is tightly integrated with Visual Studio and Expression Studio, and while it’s not necessary to write Silverlight apps in these products, doing so means big gains in productivity, in end-to-end application development, and ultimately in creativity.
• Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live offers free or low cost hosting of video content, with all the advantages of scale that Microsoft hosting can provide.

Of course they’ve decided to do some things the Microsoft way; aka… let’s not run with a standard but make our own “new” standard. For instance, instead of using the W3C’s SVG standard for vector graphics, Microsoft started from scratch and created its own XML-based vector graphics subset for XAML that is structurally similar to SVG. Is that a big deal? Honestly, I don’t know that I’ve used a web app that uses SVG. There’s also no Linux support (for now a least). I’m sure all the Linux fanboys will be up in arms that they are left behind. I would think that if it runs on OSX, it would be easy enough to compile it to work on Linux. Miguel de Icaza has already expressed interest in building an open-source Linux-compatible Silverlight implementation. In fact, de Icaza admits that he is “kind of happy” that Microsoft didn’t make a Linux-based Silverlight port, because he thinks that “implementing [Silverlight] sounds incredibly fun and interesting.” Since Novell, the company that sponsors Mono, has a close relationship with Microsoft, de Icaza and other Mono developers are well-positioned to build a Linux-based Silverlight browser plugin.

More info:

LiveSide: Silverlight: Did Microsoft just do something cool?

ars Technica: Microsoft’s Flash-killer Silverlight steals the show at MIX07