:talkingfuture.com Come and learn about the future…

Thomas: Ever since Google rose to the lofty position of number one search engine the question has been asked, will Google ever make a full blown OS? Access to the service they provide requires a computer, and in the overwhelming majority of cases that means Windows. No business wants to be in a position where its future is staked on the success of another company, so it makes sense Google might want to compete with Microsoft, to regain some control of there destiny.

What are the chances of me dual booting a Google OS with OS X in the future? Would the Google OS just be another linux distribution amongst many?

Martin:There are a lot of people out there in internet land that would like to see a Google OS. Whether Google could bring anything useful to the world of OS’s is another matter. I suppose that they already have two products that may be considered OS’s in different ways.

iGoogle – My iGoogle lets me view my RSS feeds, Gmail, Google Docs, countless widgets, my Picasa gallery, calendar and many others through my browser. In may ways you could see this as a Cloud OS. If I had a machine that booted straight into some kind of browser and was always connected to the internet you could complete a lot of tasks.

Android – An actual OS made by Google for mobile phones. Apparently many people are looking to take Android beyond phones and onto Netbooks in the coming months. Someone out there is bound to try installing that onto a grown up laptop. I bet that someone within the Googleplex already has. It probably wouldn’t take that much work to flesh out the features.

So Google have some of the pieces to make an OS, the question is do they want to? Would it be worth the hassle? Are people too rooted to using what they already have? Lots of applications like Office, AutoCAD and Photoshop aren’t even available for Linux, won’t that prevent people switching to GoogOs?

Thomas: I think you might be on to something here. Google don’t need to replace the OS because they simply bypass the OS. Google has cleverly designed it’s online services to work in the widest range of browsers possible, making the version of Windows or Linux you use almost irrelevant. Any concerns they do have they seem to address, for instance with Chrome and Android. Chrome simply exists to show the world how fast a browser and its javascript engine should be. Other than that it’s a terrible browser (although it is getting better). Android had to be made because the only other company to make decent mobile OS and browser is Apple, and as I said before Google can’t be beholden to one company. Android adds some much needed competition to the market.

Over the past few years I’ve seen some of the PC component manufacturers building in small Linux systems to the motherboard. This means that the computer can boot into a basic desktop with a bowser very quickly, and without the aid of Windows or even a hard disk. They sell it on the basis that if Windows crashes you can boot into Linux to browser the web for the answer, but imagine if you only use ‘cloud’ apps as you call them. If all your work is on Google Docs, or you just need to check your email, what is the point of a hard disk full of Vista? I’m pretty sure in most cases you could swap ‘Linux’ for ‘Android’ and get the same results.

Martin: And there it is. Google’s OS intentions are to ignore the OS. On the iPhone you can use the Google App to access all your Google services, if you don’t have an iPhone yet there is Android and I am certain that Google will be developing apps for all the other App Stores that are proliferating in the mobile phone business. On the desktop and laptop, Google don’t care what you are using as long as you have a browser you can use their services. I suppose this strategy means that there is no gamble for them about cloud computing. Whether everything ends up in the cloud or not you will still be using Google services.

I suppose this prompts another question for another column. What are Microsoft going to do about the cloud?