Sources: Google OS lives (and it’s coming to a netbook near you)

Heh, so I’m in the middle of writing up how interesting I think this rumor is, when the official bomb drops.

This is just so fucking huge. Granted, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about how this is all going to work, let alone play out, but this is tech news at its best in my opinion. Google and Microsoft are in the midst of an all-out war for the future of regular (non-mobile) computing. Brilliant.

Now, what I had written before the confirmation:

So, this is very interesting to say the least.

Nearly everyone I know who has a netbook runs Windows XP on it. Nearly every single one of them qualifies that by saying something like “yeah it runs XP but I just use Chrome on it.”

Again, not Vista, XP. An operating system that is nearly 8 years old. Again, 8 years. And so many people are running it on brand new netbooks because Vista sucks.

So why not cut out the middle man, right? Especially when that middle man is your biggest rival.

And at the same time you give people even better performance out of under-powered netbooks, because you’ll be giving them a barebones OS built specifically for these machines. Not an OS built for Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s.

I find the 13-inch aluminum MacBooks to be just about the perfect travel machine. And now that it’s called the MacBook Pro with huge battery life, it’s even more perfect. I never had a real desire to buy a netbook except that they’re so cheap and I wouldn’t mind having something really, really small that ran Chrome. But I never did because I had no desire to go back to using Windows. Now, I won’t have to.