Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Okay, cool. And now Michael Arrington is masturbating over himself:

It’s hard to type a blog post when one hand is being used to pat myself on the back.Last year I wrote a post about the just launched Chrome browser titled Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer.

Congrats, Michael. I guess.

Google OS is in fact an operating system. It runs hardware management off the Linux kernel and its application platform is the browser (Google Chrome). For Windows the application layer is the desktop, with the browser as another application offering but not the platform that all other applications are built off.

That difference is why I don’t think Google OS is going to be the Microsoft killer of Arrington’s fantasies, at least in the short- to medium-term, and by the long-term Microsoft will have an answer. Certainly, it will open up other opportunities for online computer usage, and it may open up “the cloud” to a more mainstream audience. But online and “the cloud” is only part of what computers are used for. What about games, business applications, embedded applications, simulations, and so on?

One issue I see is that web technology is not yet equal to desktop technology. It’s headed that direction, and great strides have been made in all verticals of web tech in the last decade, but web-based application development presents its own unique challenges that desktop application development has long since resolved. If you strip away the application platform of today and replace it with a browser so that you’re forced to work within a web-based framework, then you’re reintroducing challenges application developers have to now re-address.

For example, Google Apps, which Arrington addresses:

Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

How many people actually use Google Apps for their productivity applications instead of Microsoft Office (or an open source alternative)? It would be nice to see that stat, but nobody I personally know uses Google Apps for their regular document editing needs. Why not? Because it sucks. Response is slow, features are limited, and it’s in a browser.

Even if the browser is the operating system, Google Apps is not at the level of Microsoft Office. For example, I always have issues with Google Apps when formatting my document. I don’t actually know how it really looks until I make it a PDF, since there’s always a variation between the edit view of the document and the printed view. I don’t have that problem with Office.

Don’t get me wrong: Google OS is an exciting announcement that will open up another vertical in the OS market, but it isn’t a replacement for the traditional desktop OS platform. There are issues with a browser-based OS that desktop OS’s simply provide better solutions for, and for that reason Google OS will not be for everyone. ReadWriteWeb posted 10 Things We’re Dying to Know about Chrome OS that is an example of some of the challenges a browser-based OS faces. Like I said, some of these things the desktop OS is simply better at performing.

But of course with announcements like these people like Michael Arrington have to do the masturbatory dance. It keeps their egos (and paychecks) growing. I just advise against being sucked into the hype.

Rather than share a bunch of documents, you create a Stixyboard, which you can then share and collaborate on any note, photo, document, or todo list that you place on that Stixyboard, including copying and pasting or linking to any website. This is a bit different from most collaboration tools where you collaborate on the document itself and not on a "board". Very neat.

I played around with their demo Stixyboards and I'm impressed. Every object on the board has attributes that can be tweaked. For instance, you change an image to be color, sepia, or black/white, or you can select a note and change the note color and font. Of course, you can resize and position objects wherever you want on the board, too.

It reminds me a bit of Microsoft's NetMeeting, but for the web. My only immediate gripe is that responsiveness is too slow, but 1) it's in beta, and 2) it's a browser-based tool.

Stixy definitely has potential, though. We'll see what happens.