Windows Challangers: Goobuntu and Mac OS

Mozilla Firefox has achieved an market share of over 20 percent in Europe, according to the latest figures released by French Web metrics firm XiTi and an estimated global market share of 11.5 percent. That happened in only a little over one year.

What if same trend will follow in operating systems? While until recently Firefox’s only support was the open source community, Google recently jumped in and said something like “yeah, we support Firefox browser“. It seems that this was only the beginning and Google really want to join the OS market. Recent reports confirmed that:

Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business – desktop software.

A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as ‘Goobuntu’.

Uh!! That can get big, but it’s not all as there is one more piece of news that I wouldn’t even imagined one year or five ago. Recent alliance between Intel and Apple made it possible to have:

an IBM ThinkPad that dual boots Windows XP and Mac OS 10.4 (the Intellese version). It felt like I was in the twilight zone seeing the shiny Mac interface on a black IBM laptop.

Running Mac OS on non-Apple hardware isn’t Apple’s intention with 10.4, but now that it’s possible, surely a community will spring up around the possibilities – and hopefully get their hands on the necessary drivers.

Something to keep an eye on..

UPDATE: It seems that Google denies the Goobuntu rumor:

technology spokeswoman Sonya Borälv responded very quickly to my query on the topic. She said that “[w]e use Ubuntu internally but have no plans to distribute it outside of the company.”

Same thing happened with Gmail, doesn’t it?

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