Defining the netbook OS

With the launch of the Chrome OS, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has taken the opening shot in the battle for the netbook operating system. In many ways that fight is an extension of the battle of the smartphone, which pits the convenience of mobility versus the computational might of traditional PC platforms. But with the launch of the Chrome OS, Google is opening a new front in the war, pitting its Web-driven software and applications model against the powerful native-software approach championed by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).

“Microsoft is coming from an era  where nothing is connected, while Google is coming from an era where everything is connected,” said Jari Ala-Ruona, CEO of Movial, a designer of Linux-based mobile OSes and user interfaces, most notably those of the Nokia N810 Internet tablet. Fundamentally the netbook is the complete extension of the PC into the mobile world, Ala-Ruona said: It’s designed to be extremely portable and -- with the aid of local area WiFi and wide area cellular data connections—always connected to the Internet. “The Google OS is an operating system designed for the Internet era,” Ala-Ruona said.

The Fat OS paradigm of Microsoft was a necessity when Windows first emerged. As broadband Internet access and wireless connectivity were limited or non-existent, so, too, was the PC’s ability to network with the outside world. Though the world became much more connected, the Fat OS model persisted due to Microsoft’s dominance in the PC space, but with the development on new computing devices like the netbook, there is now much more room for other models to maneuver, Ala-Ruona said.

The smartphone space has already seen many of those new models: The Web apps on the iPhone and Android, Google’s own smartphone OS, are examples, but the Palm Pre Web-OS takes the model even further, running its applications out of the device’s browser itself. While most of the initial netbooks are powered by Windows XP, many PC makers have started offering versions with their own Linux builds. The problem with those Linux implementations is they’ve been designed by the PC manufacturers themselves, limiting their scope and requiring separate software development for each vendor.

“Google is the first credible player to enter the [netbook] market with a Linux OS that can be applied universally, as with Android,” Ala-Ruona said. “It’s what people have been waiting for.”