Google announced the project in a post on its official blog late Tuesday. The Web search giant said the new operating system will be a "natural extension" of its Chrome Web browser and will bear the same name. The new OS is not expected to appear on any devices until the latter half of 2010.

"Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve," Google wrote on its blog.

Google's current plan is to target its new operating system initially at netbooks, the popular small portable PCs. But it said Chrome OS is "being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems." The new OS is separate from the Android operating system that Google has developed for wireless phones, though the company says there may be some areas where the two platforms overlap.

Hilal said the news was not a big surprise, as rumors have circulated for months that Google intended to make a run at netbooks with Android. He said the company may be successful at taking some share from Microsoft in the netbook space, but that the competition in the higher end of computing devices will be much more difficult.

"I really don't picture Google going upstream to laptop or PC market," he said. "They may try, but that is a much tougher row to hoe."

Microsoft has long dominated the market for the systems that run personal-computer applications. No other company has been able to mount a serious challenge in years.

The company also retains its hold on the Web browser market. Since it was introduced last year, Chrome has failed to make much headway against Internet Explorer, Microsoft's market-leading browser. But Chrome has generated good reviews with recent improvements, and may continue to gain share.

But operating systems are far more complex and some hardware companies argue that Google's software, including its Android mobile-phone operating system, isn't robust enough to handle many tasks.

Google said the new computer-operating system would be open-source, meaning that independent developers would have access to and be able to modify the underlying code.

Google said that the new operating system, to be called Google Chrome OS, will be available to consumers in the second half of 2010.

The search engine giant said it was designing the system's security architecture so users "don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

By: DocMemory
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