Google Chrome OS 2009 = MSN Companion 1999?

YouTube video courtesy of googlechrome

Google announced their Chrome OS yesterday…

Releasing the Chromium OS open source project

And, like a lot of people I watched the live stream on a web page built using Cold Fusion (how retro!) and requring either Real or Windows Media to watch (what happened to YouTube?). I thought Chrome OS was going to be a superset of Android and was very excited about the prospect of this super-Android on tablet computers. Instead, I became less and less excited by Chrome OS as the presentation unfolded.

After the announcement’s conclusion, I tried to figure out why this all seemed so familar. Then, I remember a product I really liked that failed about a decade ago: Microsoft’s MSN Companion. The MSN Companion was based on Windows CE (like today’s Windows Phones) and essentially hosted Internet Explorer 4 in its firmware. The MSN Companion was a desktop dedicated web browser. Although it was not a mobile device, it was essentially 10 years ahead of Google’s Chrome OS.

MSN Companion with a T-Mobile Dash on top of it to provide relative size information

I thought the MSN Companion was a great idea a decade ago. However, I’m not sure what is essentially a dedicated browser opearting system is what we need or want today.

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