Why did Google announce Chrome OS today? Microsoft will be announcing something next Monday

Microsoft will be making a big announcement next Monday, although we don’t know any details about it. But from the above update on FriendFeed by Robert Scoble, it seems it will be similar to the Chrome OS that Google announced today. It could very well be something based around their research project Gazelle:

Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection.

Another point from the latest Microsoft Research news about Gazelle which could mean Microsoft aiming for a Web Apps based OS:

Envisioning an OS for Web Apps

Gazelle represents the first time that a browser has been implemented as a multi-principal operating system. From the amount of interest and speculation the paper has generated, it appears that this is an idea whose time has come. For Wang and her colleagues, there are still many challenges in working through this complex problem, but they are convinced that their work advances the industry toward a new generation of operating system tailored for Web environments. Wang believes that if their research could lead to browsers evolving into multi-principal operating systems, then Web applications would take a giant step forward in functionality and quality.

“I would like to see Web applications achieve function and quality parity with desktop apps,” Wang says. “That’s the ultimate goal of this research.”

Microsoft might be preparing a netbook OS based around Gazelle if it has something to do with the Chrome OS. But that’s just pure speculation on my part. Windows 7 is also expected to RTM this Monday, the 13th of July. So, this could just be the announcement for that.

We’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft comes up, and looking at the successful announcements track record they’ve had this year, I expect something very good.