Google's annoncement of a netbook operating system based on Chrome certainly made a lot of noise. Early reports focused on the negative effects the new OS would have on Microsoft. After pondering the news and reading different viewpoints I'm inclined to agree with those who think that this doesn't hurt Microsoft.

I just recently bought a Dell netbook with the Ubuntu OS. Ubuntu has a netbook remix which looks like a very promising interface for this type of computer. I'll let you know more once I take delivery and try it out. In any case the Chrome OS will be competing with the netbook remix as well as Windows.

There's also a new OS for netbooks called Jolicloud that looks very promising and recently announced funding. Jolicloud may be unknown right now but they have more than a year to get the word out before Google delivers the Chrome OS.

Finally there's the soon to be released Windows 7 which they say will be optimized for netbooks. I've seen universally positive reviews of Windows 7 from the early beta testers. It appears that Microsoft learned their lesson after the Vista debacle. So it's certainly not a given that Google will crush Microsoft in this space.

There you have it. Google has three strong competitors with a good head start on them. Plus there's the confusion related to where Google Android fits into the mix. For those reasons I think that the Google Chrome OS is far from a sure thing.