Chrome OS: It’s Kind of a Big Deal

A few weeks ago, Google announced that they would be entering the operating system market. While this wasn’t really a huge surprise to most people in the industry, it did come with a bit of a bombshell: Google Chrome OS will be the first “cloud operating system”. At this point, you may be wondering what on (Google) Earth does that mean? In a cloud computing environment, your applications and service are located in “the cloud” (i.e. The Internets) instead of being installed locally on your own machine. You probably use cloud applications every day. Some notable examples are Facebook, Gmail, and Flickr. There are many benefits to an operating system that fully harnesses the power of the cloud, which is exactly what Google sets out to do with Chrome OS.