google

Author's Note: When I first wrote this I had been working under the assumption that the XBL2 code hosted on Google was in fact a Google project. I have since learned that it was the brainchild of Sergey Ilinsky (http://www.ilinsky.com/), who has more recently been working on a number of other rich Internet applications.My apologies for any confusion this may have caused. Read more »

Editor's Notes: This was originally published on 11 October 2009.

The announcement came in the middle of the night, Pacific time (and hence in both my and Google’s time zone), with almost no fanfare. Google quietly declared its intentions to create a new operating system, and just like that, the dynamics of the computing world changed. Read more »