Integration Ahead
Other software providers may need to tweak their apps to work as advertised with Chrome OS. Salesforce.com has added hooks to Google AdWords, Google Apps, Google's Data API, and Google App Engine, and "official support" for Google's Chrome browser may be next, says Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce's VP of product marketing. It has taken close cooperation with Google and two years of work to get those results. But what about the many legacy and custom apps used in business? Any fine tuning required by Chrome OS would fall into the laps of already maxed-out IT departments.

Chrome OS is being designed for computing devices ranging from netbooks to full-size PCs. The degree to which it will exploit a fully configured PC--one with a 750-GB hard drive, for instance--is unclear, as are any plans for running standalone apps on Chrome OS. We'll get a better understanding of these and other questions when Google submits Chrome OS as an open source project later this year.

Google's forthcoming operating system is being written with speed, simplicity, and security as priorities, for users who spend most of their time online. It's designed to boot quickly (in a few seconds), and it will apply local caching and processing for times when users are disconnected from a network or otherwise working offline. Fast, wireless access to the Web could be Chrome OS's killer app. On the other hand, a dozen mobile operating systems, including Google's Android, are already positioned for that scenario.

Google describes Chrome OS as "lightweight." In comparison, Windows has been called many things, but lightweight isn't one of them. Over the last 15 years, Microsoft's OS has swelled from 6 million lines of code (Windows 3.1) to more than 50 million (Vista), by some estimates.

That speaks to Windows' heritage as a PC operating system, but Microsoft has been gradually building Windows' bona fides as a cloud OS in its own right. Windows Live provides a range of Web-enabled capabilities, from messaging to data storage, while coming online versions of Office compare to Web tools like Google Apps.

What does Microsoft think about Google's Chrome OS? "There's nothing there to look at yet," says Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud services. At its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans last week, Microsoft announced pricing and service-level agreements for its forthcoming Windows Azure services, which are due for general availability in November. While Google builds a cloud OS for the desktop, Microsoft is hurriedly building out a cloud OS for the data center.

Hauger is right that Chrome OS is only half-baked. (Windows Azure is, too.) Google is working with vendors such as Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba to design Chrome OS-based devices. Such products, however, are still at least a year away. Speed and simplicity in the cloud may be fantastic design goals, but getting there is arduous work.