gOS

» see thinkgos.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

gos shipped on a 199-dollar walmart pc in november 2007. i saw the wired headline about that launch and treated it the way i treated most US-walmart stories. honestly, as something happening in a country whose retail chains do not exist where i live. by 2007 my desktop ran windows xp on a ttnet adsl line. linux was on my second machine, but the distro was ubuntu and the machine was not a 199-dollar netbook.

good os llc was a small los angeles outfit. its founder david liu had been at everex, the US PC builder, and the partnership built out from there. the everex gpc tc2502 went on sale at walmart for 199 dollars on november 1 2007. the OS was an ubuntu 7.10 remix with a mac-like dock that loaded google web apps as first-class citizens. gmail, google calendar, google docs sat in the dock alongside firefox and openoffice.

gos 2.0 rocket shipped in february 2008 with a redesigned launcher. the everex cloudbook netbook came out at the same time, priced at 400 dollars to undercut the asus eee pc. by mid 2008 there had been four major versions of the OS: 1.0, 2.0 rocket, 2.9 space. then 3.0 gadgets. for whatever reason, none of them solved the upgrade problem. ubuntu 8.04 broke the gpc launcher in ways the small dev team could not patch quickly enough.

the 3.1 gadgets release in january 2009 was the last build. david liu pivoted to building a chinese twitter clone called wozai and the gos site went unmaintained. there was no shutdown announcement, just a fade. by early 2011 the website itself was offline. either way, the everex hardware that had carried the brand was already dead. everex stopped shipping pcs in late 2009 after first international computer, its taiwanese parent, pulled the plug on the line.

the chromebook arrived in 2011 and took the slot gos had been aiming at. honestly, that is the actual story. google did the same thing gos was doing. with hardware partnerships and real engineering investment behind it. gos was a one-OEM remix run by a tiny team. chrome os was google itself shipping the same idea three years later. there was no path for an independent project to compete once that happened.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

the os itself was workmanlike. ubuntu 7.10 underneath, e17 (enlightenment) for the launcher in the 2.0 rocket build, gnome in the later builds. honestly, the marketing was the loud part. 'google os' was a branding stretch, gos had no relationship to google as a company. liu had used the name 'good os' first and the abbreviation gos rode the coattails of 'google os' speculation in the tech press through late 2007.

the actual google-side integration was a folder of bookmarks to google web apps and a few launcher icons. that was the whole story. it did not have google's apis built in, no auth handoff with gmail. the cloudbook netbook ran the same OS with the same setup. it was a remix done by people who liked google products, not a partnership with google.

~ the long tail ~

liu's wozai launched in 2009 and was shut down by chinese authorities in 2010 during a wider crackdown on microblog platforms. that ended the good os story too. the everex brand was acquired by an israeli company called eldim in 2010 and the line was discontinued in 2011. the gos website domain was let lapse, the OS images can still be found on archive mirrors. for whatever reason, the 2.0 rocket build is the most-referenced version in collector communities.

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