Google said Wednesday that the company is actively working with hardware partners to develop netbooks based on its newly-announced Google Chrome OS. The question is, who? Google revealed the answer late on Wednesday.
Early Wednesday, representatives at Acer, Asus, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard all declined to confirm any plans to develop netbooks based on the Chrome OS. Meanwhile, sources at and close to those companies said that Google had yet to establish the sort of close working relationships that Microsoft had put in place to enable those OEMs to ship Windows-based machines.
Later Wednesday, however, Google disclosed a list of its partners in a second blog post: Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. Google later added Toshiba to the list as well.
At this point, little is known about the Chrome OS itself, as well as its potential market. Google announced the Chrome OS on Tuesday night; a day later, numerous questions remained about the OS itself and Google’s plans for it.
“Google Chrome OS 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,” Google vice president Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson wrote in a blog post.
If there is a working relationship between Google and major hardware OEMs, however, it’s either very preliminary or deep inside the company.
Dell, for example, declined to comment directly. “Dell constantly assesses new technologies as part of managing our product development process and for consideration in future products,” a Dell spokeswoman said.
HP, for its part, said it “was studying Chrome”. “Regarding Chrome, we want to assess the capability it may have for the computer and communications industries, and so we are studying it,” a company spokeswoman said in an email. “HP is constantly evaluating ways to help solve customer challenges. With respect to if, how or when HP might introduce any Chrome-enabled platforms, we maintain a practice of declining to comment on products that may or may not be under way.”
Representatives for the Acer Group in the United States, which includes Gateway, declined comment, citing the need to consult with overseas executives who were not immediately available. Acer has already acknowledged a Android prototype PC, however. A marketing executive with Asus in the United States, a company which launched the netbook category with the Eee PC, also officially declined to comment.
To date, Google has left virtually all information surrounding the Chrome OS in the company’s blog post. Put simply, the Chrome OS is described as “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.”
Google representatives could not be reached for comment at press time. Microsoft representatives could also not be reached for comment.
Pichai and Upson claimed that both the Android operating system, as well as the Chrome OS, share similarities but are not the same thing. The Android operating system has appeared in two phones from T-Mobile within the United States, both manufactured by HTC. The most recent offering, the MyTouch 3G, launched in the United States on Wednesday.
But Google has also slowly rolled out the Android platform, leaving some to wonder earlier this year whether the OS has already failed.
“Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks,” Pichai and Upson wrote. “Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”
Google Chrome OS will be open-sourced, Pichai and Upson added.
Dell already ships one of its Mini netbook line, the Mini 10v, using Ubuntu, a Linux distribution maintained by Canonical. HP has done the same with a customized Ubuntu distribution on its Mini 1000 Mi netbook. And the original Eee PC launched with Xandros, a Linux distribution which was customized by Asus to make it as simple as possible to use, according to Josh Norem, a technical marketing executive at Asus’s North American business.
But in a February report, market researcher NPD found that over 96 percent of netbooks sold within the U.S. contain Windows, evidence that the majority of netbook buyers preferred a more familiar environment. Asus’s Norem confirmed that the majority of Asus netbook buyers also favored Microsoft. “We found many more people preferred Windows XP,” he said.
“People still feel uncomfortable and initimidated in a different environment, as streamlined as it is,” Norem added.
Establishing those working relationships between hardware manufacturers and Google isn’t impossible; for example, a spokeswoman for Dell noted that the company pre-installed Google desktop search across its client portfolio for a couple of years, and Dell also has an OEM relationship where the company offers a Google Search appliance.
However, Google has yet to put in place anything like the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), an annual confab where hardware vendors and Microsoft employees hash out the future of computing. The question, one source said, was whether Google shared the same ambitions, and whether the Linux platform underlying the Chrome OS would require the same depth of technical interaction Microsoft’s Windows operating system requires.
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