Hot on the heels of yesterdays Google OS announcement the search engine giant has laid out the hardware companies that have pledged to build machines that will run Chrome OS.
Acer, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Toshiba are all reportedly working with Google to develop the new OS, with emphasis on netbook style laptops. Google also stated that the code would be open sourced in late 2009 and will be free to download and run. Then following in 2010 we will see the release of the first netbooks that will be able to run the software. The blog post does not go into detail about whether the netbooks will come pre-installed with Chrome OS, but with developers investing time into creating hardware able to run it you would expect some sort of pre-installed package or at the very least an option to choose between Chrome OS and Microsoft’s current alternative.
Regardless of how the hardware partnership will work, these must be very worrying times for Microsoft as never before have they had such a huge company competing with them in the PC OS market. Google’s choice to aim at netbook users may prove to be a very smart and beneficial move given the estimates that 80% more netbooks will be sold in 2009 compared to 2008.
Along with the announcement of Google’s hardware partners they stated that they will also be working closely with Adobe throughout the design and development of the OS. This could prove crucial in the up and coming OS war due to the wide use of Adobe flash software.
If you haven’t heard about Google Chrome OS yet you can see what was made of the original report in yesterday’s blog post here.