Netbook OS War

With introduction of ASUS EeePC, a new consumer market emerged called NetBook, and soon from HP to Sony, released their own version of Netbook. Netbooks are laptop kind of devices which are constructed around the Intel Atom processor. And the OS is more or less a browser engine, the first to roll out was Moblin, a linux based OS for mobile based devices. Microsoft has its own version of XP for netbook, but this is not a browser based OS, instead is a full fledged OS core stripped down and ported for Intel Atom based platform architecture. Last week with the burst of news that Google is gonna take on Microsoft in the OS segment at first surprised me. With the kind of headline tickers on CNN and BBC, I started thinking that Google is gonna release a desktop OS just like the Android OS for mobiles, and with further investigation (using google), it was clear that Google is gonna introduce an OS for the Netbook and not the desktop, which would be again based on the Chrome Browser Engine.

The buzz around is that “Wow Google is the first one announce for Netbook.” Well yes Google is first to announce, but they still didn’t roll out the product. Also this doesn’t mean that you can expect a Microsoft press release in coming time, stating that they would “start an initiative to develop a browser based OS for netbooks” like Google. Instead what you can hear from Microsoft is that they are “ready to release a browser based OS for netbooks“. Yes unlike all times where Microsoft comes second in taking initiatives, this time they have been ahead in time. Microsoft has been working on a browser based OS project code name as Gazelle, and with this publication from Microsoft Research, its clear that they are already working, we just got to wait and watch, who is gonna be first in releasing the Netbook OS.

I now wonder if Adobe has any plans for the Netbook OS, they already started working with Intel to port Adobe Flash Player 10 for Intel Atom platforms, will they have their own version of Netbook OS ?