While the release timeframe of the Chrome OS was never a secret, a project of such a major undertaking clearly faces the potential for slippages. This week however, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) vice president of product management Sundar Pichai brushed such concerns aside when he confirmed that the company's free Chrome OS will be ready later this year. 

For the uninitiated, the vision behind the Chrome OS is simply to build a computer that revolves around the web browser. And in the single-minded drive to present users with the browser, a side objective involves booting up in the shortest possible time. In fact, demonstrations of an early version of Chrome OS last year saw it clocking a boot time of just seven seconds.

What is exciting here is how the Chrome OS has the potential to revolutionize the way most of us use computers. While there is a fair number of detractors and critics, Chrome OS has a few things going for it:

Pervasive Internet use

As pointed out in the introductory YouTube video about the Google Chrome OS, most of us already spend the majority of our time on the web browser. In fact, the average teenage computer user today is unlikely to even remember how life was before pervasive Internet access became the norm. The number of such users whose computing experience revolves around the Internet (and by extension, the browser) will only keep increasing. For many of these users, switching to the Chrome OS will seem like a logical progression.

Acceptance of cloud computing

The philosophy of Chrome OS involves storing data in the clouds. And while privacy and security concerns remain, this certainly didn't appear to be adequate to stop the other 99.994% of Facebook users from quitting the popular social networking site. Even for corporations, there is a growing acceptance of cloud computing and the services that are hosted in it.

Availability of mobile broadband

AT&T's recent revamp of its smartphone data plans resulted in an uproar, mainly due to the axing of the unlimited data plan. Another way of seeing it though, would be how mobile phone companies are finally waking up to the importance of mobile data access, and how users just want to tethering their laptops. With deployments of next-generation mobile broadband networks such as LTE around the globe, fast and readily available Internet is an increasing given. Availability of Internet access from anywhere will only bolster the attractiveness of the Chrome OS.

Questions remain

Of course, questions remain that need to be answered as well. While the design documents for Chrome OS describes the presence of a file system, it does so in the context of its use to update the OS and store configuration files--and not the storing of user files. So what happens when you want to catch up on some work, such as doing up some presentation slides or reviewing some emails while on a long flight?

Also, the initial plan sees Google releasing custom-made netbooks with Chrome OS already installed. How easy or difficult would it be to install the operating system on a standard netbook or laptop remains to be seen.

So what is your opinion of the Chrome OS? Do you think it will simply fizzle out and die, or be a game changer on the computing scene? - Paul Mah  (Twitter @paulmah)