14 DAY TRIAL // Google is rumored to be secretly working on an operating system but no one was willing to fully deny or confirm it. A "not yet" is all I could come up with as an answer after asking somebody working there and that will never be good enough.
But it seems that Google is going to the hardware market before that, and the picture on the left says the whole story. "Google compatible" is what the box reads and, believe you me, it's a strange thing to find written on a box. The picture was sent by Markus Renschler to Philipp Lenssen of blogoscoped.com and it really shows just how big the Mountain View based company has become over the past 7 years or so.
The moment you, as a search engine and as a company dealing solely with the Internet, get to have your brand on the box of a hardware component is the moment you know you own the Internet. When your competition uses your advertising platform in order to advertise theirs, you own that specific area. When you are the standard to which everything moving online is measured, you own. Basically, Google owns us and it is actually taking care of us at the same time, providing each and every one of us with personalized ads.
OK, I might have exaggerated a bit, but the fact remains that if a company thought it would be benefic for its business to be stamping a "Google compatible" sticker on the boxes of its products, the Great Search Engine is pretty damn big, as if we didn't already know it.
Oh, don't worry, it's nothing serious, the only problem still in question is Google's alleged Operating System, there's nothing hardware-related brewing? Yet. At the rate things are going, I don't know if next year I'll be able to say the same thing.