It was widely reported (or rumored) back in August (see my “Much ado about Chrome OS” blog) that Google would be shipping a Chrome OS notebook or tablet by Black Friday (aka November 26th 2010).

Well, that day has come and gone and there’s still no sign of Chrome OS shipping.

It looks like, based on this report by Engadget, that Chrome OS systems will be generally available in 2011, but that units will be available  this year for internal use à la Nexus One.

My earlier blog also suggested that perhaps Chrome OS would be positioned as a tablet OS for low cost, always-connected Internet devices whereas a richer OS like Android would make more sense for feature-rich devices. However, Eric Schmidt, at Web 2.0, made it clear that Chrome OS would be for devices with keyboards while Android would primarily be for touch (tell that to my T-Mobile G2).

Unfortunately, that clarification still doesn’t tell me why one would buy a Chrome OS device over an Android one. Google has some work to do to differentiate and position its two operating systems.

In the mean time, Jolicloud has beaten Google to the punch by launching the Jolibook, a netbook running the Jolicloud OS (based on Ubuntu). It is currently available only in the UK.

I have tried out Jolicloud version 1.0 and find it easy to use, but nothing spectacular. It has a very good integration with cloud storage services like Dropbox and Zumodrive. This allows you to share data between the Jolibook and your regular PC, making the former a great companion device.

Jolibook also includes a number of social features including a tie-in with Facebook log-in and its own social network that allows you to find out what other Jolicloud users are doing e.g. which are the popular applications etc. This secondary social network creates some level of stickiness: when you have invested some time/effort into setting this up, you will be less likely to switch to another environment.

My former employer, DeviceVM (now called Splashtop Inc), has also jumped into the fray, but in the reverse direction: whereas you are able to buy notebooks from HP, Dell, Sony and others, with Splashtop already installed, you were previously not able to download a version of Splashtop and install it on a system that you already have. To remedy that, Splashtop OS is now available for download, in beta form, from the Splashtop Inc website. In a “one up” to Google, Splashtop comes with Bing (thanks to moi) as the default Internet search engine.

At the end of the day, the big question is how these non-Windows operating systems will change the way we use computers or the Internet. With Splashtop, DeviceVM was successful in changing boot time expectations: Windows 7 boots much faster than Vista, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that the new MacBook Airs had this new feature called “Instant-On”, and there is a bunch of new technology (described here) to allow super fast “boot” with Linux. DeviceVM was also the first to realize that users really want to use the Internet most of the time and had a product to cater to that expectation.

The next step will be a change in user behavior aided by all this new technology and the increasingly social nature of the Internet. 2011 is definitely going to be an interesting year.

For the purposes of work, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 Linux on a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

For some strange reason this morning, the Ubuntu virtual disk was just going on and on, spinning away and responsiveness was near zero.

Running “top” showed that a daemon called trackerd was eating a bunch of CPU cycles.

A quick search on Google revealed that trackerd indexes your hard disk for quicker searches.

Does that sound familiar?

Anyone who has encountered Windows Vista would have seen that same problem: the total lack of responsiveness in the user interface while the hard disk chugs away.

One would think that the Linux folks are generally more “progressive” than the people at Redmond.

But nooooo! As they say:”Fools seldom differ”.

OS X Leopard also has the same problem.

I think the issue is that no one in a product development organization goes through the end-to-end experience of an average user. Usually, someone has a machine all set up and all he does is to plunk in new binaries and run them.

On the other hand, the average user has a brand new computer and has to go through all that initial set up (and indexing à la trackerd/Vista).

So development organizations have to sit at the place of the end user and really examine every step the user goes through. Only then will their products be really user friendly.

I am still waiting…