There’s been plenty of chitchat about a “Google oper­ating system”, since oh I don’t know when. The last time the rumour went up that Google was about to intro­duce it’s own general-​​purpose com­puting envi­ron­ment, it turned out to be phone soft­ware instead: Android. Hewlett Packard has now announced that they are ‘Studying’ Android for PC Use. The idea being that Android is designed to run on low-​​power CPU chips designed for mobile devices, but nowa­days that’s exactly the kind of chip com­puter man­u­fac­turers are putting in mini lap­tops and calling them net­books, so how about Android on a netbook?

“Google has been working with PC makers to put Android in netbooks.…HP and other com­puter makers for the past year have been trying to make it sim­pler for users to per­form many common tasks—such as viewing photos or watching video—on their machines, in some cases adding their own, more user-​​friendly fea­tures to Microsoft Windows.”

Sounds rea­son­able, and there you are, the Google OS for real. I don’t mind Android, like every­thing else Google does I think it’s a fan­tastic idea rel­a­tive to other phone oper­ating sys­tems and I bet the imple­men­ta­tion is great too. But I’m still wary of this move. Android is linux-​​based and open source–ish, but there already exists mul­tiple active projects to remod­u­late ever-​​flexible linux into a dis­tri­b­u­tion tiny and/​or user-​​friendly enough for light­weight, application-​​oriented com­puting netbook-​​style. Most of those projects aren’t tied to a single com­pany either by code or cul­ture. We’re already toying with giving a single for-​​profit com­pany some­thing like an infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture monopoly. Do I sound ridicu­lously para­noid if I wonder out loud if this is a slip­pery slope towards yielding our per­sonal oper­ating sys­tems to Google as well?