Google Going Up Against Real Estate Giants... And Microsoft

Seems like there's never a dull moment at Google these days. Just days after announcing tweaks to its search engine (that very likely sent Bing's creators in a panic), the guys at Google came out with two big announcements that may change the world as we know it. Well, almost.

The first big change came with a Google Maps tweak. Google Maps in Australia and New Zealand now tell give users detailed information about land values, rental rates, and other real estate-related bits of data. This is apparently to help people find homes, buy land, and basically do what most big names in real estate do.

Of course, the announcement put the big names in real estate on edge. Some see it as Google trying to dabble encroaching in their lucrative business, although no one's really sure how this will impact the industry. For now, I'm sure users will love the idea that it's easier to find a cheap place to live in Australia. Now if only they'll unveil the service in Singapore...

The second big thing to come out of the Google grapevine this week is the announcement of an entire operating system. Google's planning to unveil Google Chrome OS next year, and it will power various systems from netbooks to fully-loaded desktop PC's.

Naturally, the first question to pop up was whether Google was cannibalizing Android. The answer, of course, was no -- Android is meant to run on mobile devices and netbooks, while Chrome OS will run on netbooks, laptops, and PC's. The little overlap will prove to be insignificant, Google says.

Chrome OS will be borrowing heavily from Android's architecture, but will be running its own show. Google has been leading the drive to cloud computing for the past several years. The Chrome browser will essentially be the OS, since you'll pretty much be doing all your work there.

There's just one problem. Working on the cloud is all well and good, and it's very optimistic to think that it's going to be the future of computing. But what happens when the world gets overloaded by Chrome OS users? Will the world's digital infrastructure cope with bandwidth-hungry cloud computers?

I'd like to think Google has that covered too, but I guess there are things that even Google can't control. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.