Wow. So remember all those whispers about a Google desktop operating system that never seem to go away. You thought they might with the launch of Android, it's mobile OS, but they persisted. And for good reason, because it's real.

In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. "It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be," Google writes tonight on its blog.