Well, i would like to quote a few things here...

Firstly its nearly impossible to overthrow the WIndows dominance in a fortnight.

Secondly, there are millions of software titles floating around for Windows, which surely wont be the case for Google OS.
I won't get my favourite web browser, File sharing app, and my favourite game to run on that OS over night.

Thirdly, not all of mine, or other people's hardware will be compatible with this new OS. Wht's the bloody use if i can't get my modem, AGP card and TV tuner to run on it?

Fourthly, we see tens of new products floating around daily, but do we just change over to them all of a sudden? Ofcourse not! we stick to our old tried and trusted apps.

Fifthly, it will be a tough deal to provide security with ease. People are ready to compromise security for ease! and thats an obvious fact... people should be able to use a thing in the first place and then they will be concerned about its security.

Sixthly, many attempts have been made and rather all failed, to overthrow Microsoft Windows. No matter how much u hate MS, it is the easiest and friendliest of the lot. Even for a programmer, he doesn't have to go through the dilemma as to what base to use for developing the software, which is the case with Open source OS's. Like to build on GNOME or KDE etc. Look at SuSe Linux, they tried so hard and they came way far... but in the end they realised it didnt even matter :-p
They themselves accepted the fact that Linux couldn't be made as easy as MS Windows and finally open sourced the proprietary Distro.

Seventhly, Windows is getting securer day by day. Look at Vista for instance. Even XP, when installed on an NTFS partition and when run using Limited user account, doesnt cater to any of the flaws addressed by SP2.

Thats it i guess... it will be a fierce battle fought if ever someone rivals... and as far as google is concerned... it will just be a dream shot.

Ok i m posting a real interesting article. It actually makes me wonder at times how Google is earning money. Probably even in their OS they will have adsense )

Read it and comment on it.

The Secret Source of Google's Power
Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.
No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.

I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.



Speculation: Gmail's Architecture and Economics
Let's make some guesses about how one might build a Gmail.

Hotmail has 60 million users. Gmail's design should be comparable, and should scale to 100 million users. It will only have to support a couple of million in the first year though.

The most obvious challenge is the storage. You can't lose people's email, and you don't want to ever be down, so data has to be replicated. RAID is no good; when a disk fails, a human needs to replace the bad disk, or there is risk of data loss if more disks fail. One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the isles of Google's data center with a shopping cart full of spare disk drives instead of vacuum tubes. RAID also requires more expensive hardware -- at least the hot swap drive trays. And RAID doesn't handle high availability at the server level anyway.

No. Google has 100,000 servers. [nytimes] If a server/disk dies, they leave it dead in the rack, to be reclaimed/replaced later. Hardware failures need to be instantly routed around by software.

Google has built their own distributed, fault-tolerant, petabyte filesystem, the Google Filesystem. This is ideal for the job. Say GFS replicates user email in three places; if a disk or a server dies, GFS can automatically make a new copy from one of the remaining two. Compress the email for a 3:1 storage win, then store user's email in three locations, and their raw storage need is approximately equivalent to the user's mail size.

The Gmail servers wouldn't be top-heavy with lots of disk. They need the CPU for indexing and page view serving anyway. No fancy RAID card or hot-swap trays, just 1-2 disks per 1U server.

It's straightforward to spreadsheet out the economics of the service, taking into account average storage per user, cost of the servers, and monetization per user per year. Google apparently puts the operational cost of storage at $2 per gigabyte. My napkin math comes up with numbers in the same ballpark. I would assume the yearly monetized value of a webmail user to be in the $1-10 range.


Cheap Hardware
Here's an anecdote to illustrate how far Google's cultural approach to hardware cost is different from the norm, and what it means as a component of their competitive advantage.

In a previous job I specified 40 moderately-priced servers to run a new internet search site we were developing. The ops team overrode me; they wanted 6 more expensive servers, since they said it would be easier to manage 6 machines than 40.

What this does is raise the cost of a CPU second. We had engineers that could imagine algorithms that would give marginally better search results, but if the algorithm was 10 times slower than the current code, ops would have to add 10X the number of machines to the datacenter. If you've already got $20 million invested in a modest collection of Suns, going 10X to run some fancier code is not an option.

Google has 100,000 servers.

Any sane ops person would rather go with a fancy $5000 server than a bare $500 motherboard plus disks sitting exposed on a tray. But that's a 10X difference to the cost of a CPU cycle. And this frees up the algorithm designers to invent better stuff.

Without cheap CPU cycles, the coders won't even consider algorithms that the Google guys are deploying. They're just too expensive to run.

Google doesn't deploy bare motherboards on exposed trays anymore; they're on at least the fourth iteration of their cheap hardware platform. Google now has an institutional competence building and maintaining servers that cost a lot less than the servers everyone else is using. And they do it with fewer people.

Think of the little internal factory they must have to deploy servers, and the level of automation needed to run that many boxes. Either network boot or a production line to pre-install disk images. Servers that self-configure on boot to determine their network config and load the latest rev of the software they'll be running. Normal datacenter ops practices don't scale to what Google has.

What are all those OS Researchers doing at Google?
Rob Pike has gone to Google. Yes, that Rob Pike -- the OS researcher, the member of the original Unix team from Bell Labs. This guy isn't just some labs hood ornament; he writes code, lots of it. Big chunks of whole new operating systems like Plan 9.

Look at the depth of the research background of the Google employees in OS, networking, and distributed systems. Compiler Optimization. Thread migration. Distributed shared memory.

I'm a sucker for cool OS research. Browsing papers from Google employees about distributed systems, thread migration, network shared memory, GFS, makes me feel like a kid in Tomorrowland wondering when we're going to Mars. Wouldn't it be great, as an engineer, to have production versions of all this great research.

Google engineers do!


Competitive Advantage
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

google has been in the game for a few years now so yes they could make a new OS. But compatibility would be a problem unless they find a way around this. I might not buy a google OS because windows has been the only OS i have used and i have found it great, the next OS purchase for me would be vista when i get my new pc, but a google OS does sound strange...

I wouldn't be surprised if Google thought about, or even attempted, an OS. They've already proven that they're willing to branch out all over the Internet (from the search engine to e-mail to the chat software, etc.), so it's not like an OS would be totally unexpected of this company.

Even so, I doubt that the thing would do very well. They wouldn't be able to lure many Windows users away because, hey, we're lazy and like having convenient access to just about all the good programs. Oh, and did I mention that we're lazy? *grins*

But if Google came up with an open-source project, I can only imagine the sheer number of programmers who wound start tweaking/fixing/improving the thing.

Google is now making an OS (well, sort of. It's based on Linux)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/31/go..._desktop_linux/

xboxrulz

UPDATE : http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8195986380.html

xboxrulz

why would you buy an OS when you can get things like ubuntu for free?

linux is becoming more user friendly all the time and soon people are going to prefer very customizable and diverse yet compatible operating systems to be able to suit their own needs. in the future there will be tons of operating systems baased on some kind of compatible framework

sigh.... BOREING,,,,

Google has announced that they are working on relasing a desktop Operating system...

The Operating system they will use.. GNU
The Kernel they will use... Linux.

Basically, a Linux distro...

A new Exciting Distro ???
Nope... they are basing it on Ubuntu !!!

Boreing Boreing Boreing.

Ubuntu.. quite easy to use..
However... there is nothing special about it.

Im betting it will be yet anouther average, non sticking out distro to add to the pool.
maybe a massive success because of Googles advertiseing power, and googles huge buisness name...

but i dont see it sticking out with the truely innovative distro's.

well, never underestimate anyone (M$ is the only exception). Anyways, I hate Ubuntu. It annoys me and it pisses me off.

xboxrulz

Personally I would never use a Google OS, but it would be a great competition to windows... maybe this will force them to start making a good product rather then the trash that they do now.