Hardware Partners Rally Behind Chrome OS, But Not Intel
by Sam Dean - Jul. 09, 2009Comments (5)- Related Blog Posts
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Following Google's announcement of its Chrome OS, which will arrive in late 2010 and is headed for netbooks, most reactions around the web are positive. There are some who say "it has an ice cube's chance in Hell of succeeding," some who say it could be a geeks-only phenomenon, and we've provided our assessment of the mixed chances that Chrome OS has. There's no question that it is attracting interest from hardware developers and others, though. As a blog post from Google and IDG News Service report, Hewlett-Packard (the number one PC maker), Acer and Asus--all big players in the netbook arena--are among early Chrome OS partners.
The Google Chrome Blog reports the following list of partners for Chrome OS: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. That's a pretty exhaustive list of the major netbook players, although I don't see Dell there. The blog post also notes that there are other hardware partners. The Google post also lists the following chip makers as partners: Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Freescale Semiconductor. Notably, Intel is not named.
Support from the hardware community will be crucial for Chrome OS, because Microsoft is aiming Windows 7 squarely at netbooks, and has historically had a lot of clout with manufacturers. Windows 7 will arrive a full year before Chrome OS.
I'm betting that Google will strive to bring Dell and Intel on board as partners. Intel, because of the optimized Atom chips it has developed with netbooks in mind, is going to be a particularly important partner to have. The big problem Google will have in wooing Intel will be that Intel and Novell are backing Moblin, a Linux-based OS that is improving in beta versions now, and will likely arrive in netbooks this year.
One other thing to note about the early list of partners for Chrome OS is that a non-hardware partner is on the list: Adobe. I have a feeling that's because Google would like Chrome OS-based netbooks to work well with Flash. Over 80 percent of the video content on the web is Flash-based, according to Adobe.
So far, Google has a strong list of partners, but it also faces a lot of competition and has to race against the clock.
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