Google earlier this week officially announced that its Linux-based netbook operating system, Chrome OS,  was going into beta. The OS is primarily driven on the cloud/Web -- the way Google envisions computing in the future with Google Docs and the Chrome browser -- and has the Chromium browser backend.

It's perhaps an early vision of what things may look like going on, but one experiment around that form of computing has already failed. The concept of Sun's network computer, a thin client, relied on the network for computing, but it failed.

But the cloud OS concept has to be sold to hardware makers, and Google has a headstart. Acer and Samsung have already signed up to sell laptops with the OS. Google has also sent out 65,000 netbooks with 3G support for customers to test. Based on it the feedback, the OS will be modified.

We'll see in time if Google's latest efforts succeeds, or falls flat on the face. Google's Android has caught fire in the smartphone and tablet space, Google Docs is gaining in popularity, and the Chrome browser is gaining market share on IE and Firefox. This is Google's most ambitious experiment to date.