Daily News : Google Apps

Rumor has been circulating the web about a possible release of Google's Chrome OS within the coming week. Chrome OS is an open source operating system built on top of a Linux kernel that focuses on web-driven applications. It is believed that the OS will initially be geared towards netbooks with full desktop and laptop support coming shortly.

Launching the OS as soon as possible makes sense, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "I would expect the Chrome OS will show up shortly because they need the ecosystem ready by the end of 2010," he told TechNewsWorld.

The other day I was thinking how GMail hasn't had any real problems lately. A day later and the popular web app was outage galore. As we shift more towards the clouds and remote hosting, we will need multiple backup options should one of these services fail.

This latest outage --Gmail's last large-scale failure didn't garner as many headlines because it happened when most folks were asleep-- raises valid questions about the viability of cloud computing, and the vulnerabilities we take on as we shift applications and data from their traditional homes on client PCs and servers to unseen resources on the Web.