Google has open sourced their Chrome Operating System project as Chromium OS, providing a sudden wealth of detail on the long-feared and revered operating system effort by the Mountain View company. Stressing that the official release of Chrome OS will not occur for at least a year, the company revealed that its motivation for putting the code out early is at least in part to attract potential partners and developers in the larger open-source community. This will be necessary, it turns out, because the OS will be at least initially device-specific; you won't be slapping it on your new Windows 7 PC without some serious tech credentials to write or adapt drivers. The OS is intended at first for netbooks and other specialty devices, not for the desktop.

Gizmodo has the best detail write-up that I could find; check them out for more technical detail.

There are two important takeaways from what Google has revealed here. First, it isn't their intention to battle head-to-head with Microsoft over the soul of the desktop (although, and I believe this point has been under-reported, the company did say that the Chrome browser, which runs on any desktop, will incorporate all the features of the new OS in itself). There is a different, deeper conflict going on, and much of the confusion observers are exhibiting over this OS results from a failure to apprehend it; you can see my take on that conflict and how Chrome OS fits into it here and here. Second, they seem to be more serious than anyone, myself included, imagined them to be in their commitment to speed, security, and stability. The only sure way to achieve control over these aspects of performance is to provide not just the software, but the hardware. Taking a page from Apple's book, that's what Google seems to be doing (albeit through partners with their own branding), at least in the initial phase. First impressions matter, and even if the company (or other developers) should port the OS over to the desktop later, they'll benefit from the inevitably smoother experiences provided to early adopters by an integrated offering.

There are a lot of posts on this event which evince some surprise at the specifics of the offering, mostly along the lines of "Whoa, it's a super-browser!" (the Gizmodo piece linked above is a case in point) or "What's the deal? It's just a browser!" Of course, these are both all that Google ever said it was going to be, but the significance is more on the computing paradigm this represents than the device or OS itself. I think it is inevitable that most computing will shift to adapt this paradigm; it's an economic inevitability in my view, one that no one defending the perpetuation of desktop computing has yet addressed convincingly in my view. This isn't to say, as so many on both sides of the proposition do, that all computing will be cloud-based, any more than all computing today is desktop based. It's just not an all-or-nothing deal. But the preponderance of computing will likely shift in that direction. Whether or not Chrome OS will provide a tipping point, we'll find out in a year.