Among the vendors who have been working closely with Google engineers to develop drivers for the new OS is Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and Sony. ChannelNews has also been told that several automation vendors are keen to trial the new operating system. In Australia Switch Automation is already running a version of their software in Linux and a move to Google Chrome would be extremly easy say the Company.
Currently Google has a big team of engineers building hardware drivers for the new OS which will be available for free to hardware vendors, the Company is also working closely with manufacturers so that the maximum amount of drivers are available when the final version is released.
Google first announced plans for a Chrome OS in July. They already have a smartphone and small computer operating system called Android which several major Companies such as Acer, Samsung, Motorola and Dell have adopted for their new smartphone offerings.
Launching the OS as soon as possible makes sense, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "I would expect the Chrome OS will show up shortly because they need the ecosystem ready by the end of 2010" he said.
Enderle blamed Google's lack of marketing expertise for doubling up on the Chrome name. "Google has showcased a massive weakness in marketing and branding, and using the same name for both the OS and the browser is a reflection of that," he pointed out. "Both are largely based on the Chrome browser, but they should have never had the same name." This mistake will be an expensive one", Enderle said.
