Everybody, but EVERYBODY, is talking about Google’s announcement that they are officially launching an operating system (OS) for personal computers. And by everybody we do mean to include Microsoft… especially Microsoft.

Microsoft launches Bing to challenge Google in the search engine department. Google launches Chrome OS to challenge Microsoft’s about to be launched Windows 7. It sounds suspiciously like war to us.

Google’s new Chrome OS will initially be aimed at small, low-cost netbooks – ready for sale by the middle of 2010 – but the aim is for it to eventually be usable on PCs as well. The official party line is that “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS.”

“We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you on to the web in a few seconds,” reckon Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice-president of product management, and Google’s engineering director Linus Upson. It’s also being designed as a dig at Microsoft, with both Sundar and Linus stressing that Chrome OS is Google’s attempt “to rethink what operating systems should be”, given that “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Like I said, it’s war, people!

All the war-mongering and not so subtle digs aside, Chrome OS aims to be an operating system that focuses entirely on the web, driven by the browser. As one clever techie type explains: “The software architecture is simple - Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.” What that means is: the browser is the platform. Basically the Internet is everything… which everyone already knows anyway so this makes perfect sense in our increasingly web-driven world.

Of course no war would be complete without minor players wading into the trenches, guns blazing. Enter Jolicloud www.jolicloud.com, a startup hailing from Paris, France, who proclaimed their hopes to give the big players a run for their money when it comes to powering the netbooks of this world on the very same day that Google announced Chrome OS.

In their own words, “Jolicloud is an Internet operating system that combines the two driving forces of the modern computing industry: the open source and the open web. Jolicloud transforms your netbook into a sophisticated web device that taps into the cloud to expand your computing possibilities. The web already hosts a significant part of our lives: mails, photos, videos, and friends are already somewhere online. Jolicloud was built to make the computer and web part of the same experience.”

And that, folks, is what they call a brave little soldier.

PS. Speaking of war, did you see the news this weekend that dozens of US government and South Korean sites were hit by a huge cyber attack over the weekend? Government sites, banks and shopping sites were targeted, potentially affecting the world economy and making it easy to believe that cyber warfare doesn’t only happen in the movies. Apparently. Or it could just be some hacker’s wet dream.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.