Will Gazelle gazump Google OS?

It has only been a couple of days since Google was rushed into announcing its new OS, as the New York Times was in the process of breaking the story. However, Google is now back on track, unveiling the list of hardware makers who will support the OS. The list includes Acer, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba on the Intel side and Texas Instruments and Qualcomm on the ARM processor side.

Acer and Asus have a healthy share of the netbook market. Lenovo and HP are behemoths in the business laptop arena, and they would not be publicly linked to Google's OS unless they were intent on making a statement. Are they just covering all the bases, or planning for a future where Microsoft is not the only game in town?

A bare bones Google blog has a little more information about the project here. However, Microsoft is unlikely to take this lying down and, lurking in its research division is Gazelle, something that was brought to our attention by a Gartner blog discussing the Chrome story. We've also previously covered Gazelle. All of a sudden Windows 7's rumble to prominence does not seem so certain, definitely in the netbook market.

What is certain is that Google's effort won't consign Windows to history, despite what some eager punters think, however, the fight is on for the "lite-OS" that could come to dominate casual, low-powered computing in the near future.