Originally Posted by Chris

That doesn't buy the thousands of developers working on hardware drivers for *nix systems, or the thousands the programs already running on these systems.

Just because Google is a powerful push in the tech industry doesn't mean they can wave a magic wand and create a totally new OS and expect the entire market to accept it.

They will have to base it off another OS, most likely Linux. There is more to a successful operating system them simply a kernel and a WM.

If they start from complete scratch, then they will have to spend a lot more money creating hardware support right off the bat, not to mention convincing developers that their platform is worth it over the already popular *nix OS's, let alone Windows or Mac OS.

That is what I mean by saying "they can't buy the community".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they cannot do it. I don't think it would be in their best interest to start from scratch when there is a perfectly good, usable, extensible system already for them to adopt. Either they use *nix base, or they have to make sure to support the drivers and API's already made for these systems -- which at this point, you might as well use it anyway.