It has always puzzled me that Google would first introduce the Android and the Chrome OS a few months later, setting up a competition between groups within Google to see which OS prevails. Now, the creator of Gmail, who no longer has an relations with Google, believed the two OS will merge into one. And I agree.
In one way or another, Google is not going to have a dual OS strategy. It is simply too messy. Not even Microsoft with years of experiences seem comfortable with this. Nor is Apple doing this. As a matter of fact, the conventional thinking is that Apple will merge iOS with OS X years down the line.
Right now, Chrome OS has the making of what the future of computing will look like. Everything will be in the cloud and we will trust that connection to cloud data will be robust enough for us to put all our eggs there. But I don't see that happen in the short-term. Sure, we have already begin to save a lot of data on Android and Gmail on desktops and laptops on Google servers but we still do a lot of work that require local storage.
I am very interested in the opportunities that Chrome OS has to offer but I don't want my next netbook to be a dumb terminal. Nor do I want that for my future Android device, whether it's tablet of smartphone. But as a solo project, Chrome OS will not survive as we have come to know it.
This is how it'll play out. Google will try to sell Chrome OS as an alternative to Windows in the netbook arena. It might find some success but eventually, Android will gain a lot of Chrome OS' features and a couple of years later, Google will announcement that it has successfully merged to two but, in reality, Chrome OS will exist only as key components of Android.
And folks, that ain't a bad thing.
More at Techcrunch.
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