Why do people insist on thinking Google is writing an operating system? Surely people realise they already have one, which allows them to build innovative but useful things on top of it.
It seems to me that Google’s strategy - as far as they have one - is to commoditize the entire software stack using web applications, and then do the best possible implementation. Then they make money by knowing more about their users than anyone else. Bearing this in mind I just don’t see where shipping an operating system to consumers makes sense. They do need to make sure that users have a decent browser on as many systems as possible, though - hence the money they are putting into Firefox.
So why would Google hire people like Mark Lucovsky? Well.. he’s a smart guy so Google would want him, they do have a fairly big cluster of computers that need operating systems so he’d want to go there. Plus - and everyone seems to be ignoring this - he architected Hailstorm:
“I had these ideas that the way to really bootstrap Web services was to come up with a model where data was the central pivot point, and we came up with an architecture for connecting people and applications with information”
Perhaps Google might be just a little bit interested in doing something like that?
It’s not like he’s the first operating system person they’ve hired, anyway.