Our list of the most innovative executives of the year spotlights the people that are pushing the envelope with new products and channel programs to bring solution providers to new heights.
Find out which executives made the grade and held their own, despite the great IT downturn of 2009.
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Discussing Google Chrome OS, Google's Sundar Pichal, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, wrote Tuesday night on the Google blog that Google Chrome OS was an "attempt to rethink what operating systems should be."
This is no search platform slap fight or personal health record jib-jab: it's an operating system challenge, and one that's going to be plenty fun to watch, even if the fact that no one's seen Google Chrome OS in action yet means observers should probably curb their enthusiasm.
Expect netbooks to become the early battleground in that coming showdown. Almost every major IT researcher predicts the sustained growth of netbooks even with the broader PC market in free fall, and Google has already confirmed it intends the earliest versions of Chrome OS to be lightweight enough for netbook consumption.
Microsoft itself has spent much of the past year trying to ward off Linux proliferation on netbooks. Microsoft's corporate Vice President of Windows Consumer Product Marketing Brad Brooks in February claimed some version of Microsoft Windows was on 80 percent of all netbooks shipped.
In their blog post, however, Google's Pichal and Upson seem to take a thinly veiled shot at Windows' reputation as, well, a slow starter, and also said that Google was in talks with several PC manufacturers to get Chrome OS onto future netbooks.
"We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear -- computers need to get better," Pichal and Upson wrote. "People want to get to their e-mail instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them."
Top PC manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that they were taking a look at Chrome, with spokespersons from each company commenting with some variation on how they would "assess" the new OS.
According to Google, Google Chrome OS' open-source code will be made available later in 2009 and the OS will be ready for consumers in the second half of 2010. Google Chrome OS will run on ARM and x86 chips, on top of a Linux kernel.
"The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the Web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work," wrote Pichal and Upson.
Google Chrome OS will be Google's second operating system following Android, which debuted in 2008 and is used on mobile devices like T-Mobile's G1 smartphone.
In the blog post, Pichal and Upson promised more updates on Google Chrome OS later this year.
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