Ballmer “not so sure” Google knows what they’re doing with Chrome OS.

When Google announced the development of and future release of Chrome OS, many people took a step back rather confused. Google has until recently been an online/web app type of company. Android brought them into the world of “desktop” software for mobile devices. With Chrome OS, Google looks to be breaking right in to Microsoft’s luxurious downtown apartment and running off with their precious jewel: the desktop OS. Now I’m not launching Chrome OS to the top of the OS heap by any means. They have a long and tedious uphill battle ahead of them. But on has to look at Android and the advances developers have made in order to get it running on netbooks/notebooks and ask ourselves if Google knows what they’re doing by introducing a very similar second OS? Steve Ballmer seems to be asking that very same question.

At the Windows Partner Conference, while Steve Ballmer expressed PR interest in Google’s latest ambition, saying that he found Chrome OS to be “highly interesting”, (read: WTF is this sh**…get off my property), though he doesn’t quite understand Google’s approach, nor does he believe that Google does either. He goes on to say that you only need one good OS. (…something about the pot calling the kettle black seems appropriate here…)

This of course is a comical statement coming from a man who leads a software company who is releasing way too many 6 different versions of Windows 7 and still clings to the grossly antiquated Windows XP that was old 3 years ago. Not to mention, Microsoft’s mobile ventures aren’t any less cluttered with Windows Mobile, Windows CE (puke), and the Zune operating system fragmenting a market that should enjoy the streamline benefits of having a single OS spread across them. But I digress.

Is the Balms going mental and just doesn’t realize how much like Google Microsoft is in this sense? They really aren’t that far off from Google’s approaches to software are they?

Source: Engadget, Yahoo, Image Source