Five Expectations for Google's Chrome OS Event

Google will finally take the wrapper off its highly-anticipated Chrome operating system during a presentation at Google HQ on Thursday. The event will include a complete overview of the product featuring a Chrome OS demonstration and Q&A session. Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management and Matthew Papakipos, Google engineering director for Google Chrome OS, will speak at the event, according to TechCrunch.

By Ian Paul
Wed, November 18, 2009

PC World — Google will finally take the wrapper off its highly-anticipated Chrome operating system during a presentation at Google HQ on Thursday. The event will include a complete overview of the product featuring a Chrome OS demonstration and Q&A session. Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management and Matthew Papakipos, Google engineering director for Google Chrome OS, will speak at the event, according to TechCrunch.

Thursday's presentation will provide at least some answers to the many questions gone unanswered since Google announced the project in July. I have no doubt Google's event will inspire more questions than it answers, but at least it's a start. Here's what we're likely to find out:

How Long Until Liftoff?

Part of Google's presentation on Thursday should include more information about when the OS will be available to consumers. It's possible Google will remain silent, and stick to its "second half of 2010" statement that we got earlier this year. But I'm hoping the company will be able to narrow it down to a particular month or at least a season.

What the Heck is Google Chrome OS?

Despite hyperbolic statements that Google dropped a nuclear bomb on Microsoft with its Chrome OS announcement, the fact is no one really knows what this system can do. Questions about Google Chrome OS's capabilities should disappear on Thursday. We should also find out whether Chrome OS is just another Linux distribution or something entirely new.

Where Do Developers Fit in?

Part of Google's promise when it announced Chrome OS is that it would make the operating system's code open source by the end of the year. If Google makes good on its promise tomorrow, where will developers fit into Google's ecosystem?

Google is making strides to involve developers in creating Google Chrome extensions and Google Wave applications. But an operating system that will supposedly change everything should present new opportunities for developers. What will those be? Is Google hoping its developer community will simply help the company improve the OS, or does Google have a more interesting plan in the works?

What's Up With the Hardware?

When Google starts the Chrome OS demo on Thursday, everyone will want to know what kind of computer is running the OS, and when we can expect to see consumer products on store shelves.

We already know that some of Google's Chrome OS partners include Acer, ASUS, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba, but when will we see some merchandise and what will it be? Google said Chrome OS will be available on netbooks to start, but what about the specs? For instance, does Google believe a Web-centric netbook should come with a lot of storage space? Does it even need a hard drive? What about RAM or optical disc drives?

1 2 next page »

What is Tech Briefcase?

TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more

Bookmark content

Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.

Search and Store

Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.

View Anywhere

Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.

Don't have an account yet?

You are here: Technology Topics » News

Most Recent Technology Topics Stories

White Papers »

Finding the right cloud solutions for your organization

HP is driving the evolution of what we call the Instant-On Enterprise. It is an enterprise that embeds technology into everything it does to better serve citizens, partners, employees, and clients. We believe that today's Instant-On Enterprises need to think differently about how they source and deliver services that are enabled by technology. They need to take advantage of a hybrid delivery model-one that truly optimizes the mix between traditional IT, private cloud, and public cloud.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Converged Infrastructure for Dummies

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Seven Priorities for Integrated Network Management - How HP Intelligent Management Center Delivers an Enterprise-class Solution

This white paper describes the major requirements for network management solutions to help the organizations become more profitable, efficient and reliable.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Measuring the Business Value of CI in the Data Center

One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Building Cloud-Optimized Data Center Networks white paper

Enterprises are turning to the Cloud to improve business agility, reduce expenses and accelerate business innovation. Cloud computing redefines the way IT assets are deployed and consumed and dramatically affects the way data center networks are architected and managed. Conventional hierarchical data center networks built to support traditional IT architectures can't meet the security, agility and price/performance requirements of virtualized cloud computing environments. This white paper reviews the impact of cloud computing on data center networks and describes HP's approach to building simpler, more secure and automated networks that fully meet the stringent performance, security, reliability and agility demands of the new data center in the Cloud.

Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

The Forrester Wave: Activities Streams, Q2 2012

The enterprise social software market is exploding thanks to converging trends of consumerization, cloud, and mobile. In this must-read report, "The Forrester Wave: Activities Streams, Q2 2012", Forrester Research Inc. evaluated five social software vendors with core strengths in the stream based on the overall strength of vendors' current offerings, a clear product strategy, and vendor market presence. In a detailed look at the space, Forrester named Yammer as a leader.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Oracle Database Appliance Best Practices

Business users increasingly demand 24x7 availability of their data while IT departments face the challenge of ensuring maximum availability while operating with limited budgets.

Unlock the Value of Cloud Computing with Workload Automation

Learn how to get the most from your cloud investment in our on-demand webinar from BMC and InformationWeek. You'll hear how integrating the cloud into your production workload brings critical business benefits.

Best Practices to Optimize Your Data Center at Every Layer of the Stack

Date: May 31, 2012
Time: 1 PM EST

Organizations are reaping the benefits of simplifying IT, lowering costs and dramatically improving transactional throughput by deploying optimized application-to-disk solutions. These pre-tuned, tested solutions encompass a wide variety of applications and use cases. Hear from industry experts, and IT executives, how these full-stack solutions can achieve three times faster deployment times and up to 75% reductions in acquisition and operational costs.

Workload Automation Trends and Best Practices in 2012

Find out when you join EMA Senior Analyst, Torsten Volk, for a discussion on the 2012 trends in workload automation and how these trends contribute to better connecting workload automation to business processes. These trends are derived from EMA's empirical research work conducted for the 2012 Workload Automation Radar Report.

Analytics at the Speed of Thought

What if you could run financial and operational planning cycles 10 times faster? Or monitor and adjust marketing campaigns in real time? What if you could instantly visualize how a price change would impact the profitability of thousands of products?

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter