Google just announced late last night that they plan on entering the computer operating system market. The Google Chrome Operating System will be open source and initially focus on the netbook market — the fastest growing computer market segment. The operating system will apparently be available on netbooks in the second half of 2010, with the open source code being released later this year.

One thing that’s kept me using a pda rather than a netbook has been the excruciatingly long startup times — the Google Chrome OS will apparently fix that, providing a quick startup similar to the “Instant On” functionality us pda users are used to. Since it’s not running Windows, it’ll (at least early on) be less susceptible to viruses and malware and possibly the greatest feature — all applications will be web-based, meaning anything you do on your Google OS powered netbook will be easily transferable to your Mac or PC.

I think Google may be on to something here.. And I couldn’t agree more with what Google says: “People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

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