We were all speculating about this, but finally, in a surprise announcement this morning on July 8th, Google said that it was planning to release a new open source operating system, based on the Chrome browser.

Interviewed by the New York Times, Sundar Pichai (vice president of product management), said “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS”. The operating system software is to be released later this year, and will be free to download. Although it is geared for powering small netbooks, Google believes that Chrome OS will also run on full-sized PC’s.

And no, the Chrome OS is not going to be a simple rebranding of Google’s Android mobile OS, as Pichai stated, “Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.”

Google official blog post also goes on to give a brief outline of the Chrome’s OS’ goals:

We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Tech analysts have been speculating for a while about Google releasing their own operating system. Now that this idea is coming into fruition, Google has a lot of competition to deal with. Windows is the current heavyweight in the OS market, while Mac OS X and Linux are constantly stealing more market share. However, this is Google we are talking about and also it is important to remember that nost netbooks are currently running Windows XP ( which is 8 years ol and runs on Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s). Chrome OS, however, is also suitable for netbooks and will run on x86 architecture chips and ARM chips, which are more common in netbooks.

Windows 7 is also considered to be potentially useful for notbooks, and will be released later this year (maybe Google will release Chrome OS’ open source code at the same time?) . This means that we are in for an interesting battle between Chrome OS and Windows 7 here.

What are your views on the announcement of Google Chrome OS? Is it a potential Windows-killer? And what do you think Microsoft’s response will be? Please feel free to comment below.