Look who’s on the Google Chrome OS bus
More info on Google Chrome OS is trickling out of the official blog, including an early FAQ that lists the companies currently onboard to support the effort. They include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.
Quite a telling group of partners. HP and Acer are the top PC makers, and ASUS is the netbook leader, so the hardware support is secured. That they’ve signed up three ARM chip-makers (and no x86, at least not yet) is interesting. And Adobe practically ensures Flash support. Color me intrigued.
About the Author: A pioneer in the field of ink blogging, Sumocat works diligently to promote digital ink and Tablet PCs, earning him a Microsoft MVP award for Tablet PCs in 2008. He also champions the cause of mobile computing in general, dabbing in various forms of mobile blogging as part of an ever-evolving experiment in the field.
JC | Jul 9, 2009 | Reply
I’m more worried about what software we will run on the Chrome OS platform. They want software developers to use only web technologies to write their applications. Everyone hated that idea when Apple proposed it for iPhone. Why is it a great idea now?
(Or does this mean, effectively, that Chrome OS is merely a conduit for Flash?)
Sumocat | Jul 9, 2009 | Reply
JC: The public opinion turnaround on web apps seemed pretty ridiculous to me too (for the record, I thought webapps for the iPhone was an adequate compromise at the time), but technology advanced and now more people recognize the potential. Gears provides offline functionality for online apps. HTML 5 offers more robust programming (and competes against Flash in several ways). Wireless broadband is more widely available. Times changes and opinions change with them.