More and more companies and universities are getting involved in newly emerging cloud computing model. Google & IBM announced a multi million dollar collaborative research project based on Cloud Computing with universities. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have also been promoting and researching on Cloud computing since a long time.

What is Cloud computing?
A research paper released on October 8th, 2007 by Greg Boss, Padma Malladi, Dennis Quan, Linda Legregni, Harold Hall from IBM states

“Cloud computing is a term used to describe both a platform and type of application. A cloud
computing platform dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, and deprovisions servers as
needed. Servers in the cloud can be physical machines or virtual machines. Advanced clouds
typically include other computing resources such as storage area networks (SANs), network
equipment, firewall and other security devices.

Cloud computing also describes applications that are extended to be accessible through the
Internet. These cloud applications use large data centers and powerful servers that host Web
applications and Web services. Anyone with a suitable Internet connection and a standard
browser can access a cloud application.”

Click here to read the paper from IBM on Cloud Computing

Xcerion is one of the companies which is expected to change the face of the game. Xcerion believes in making softwares available for free the most interesting part of this company is their browser based OS called XIOS.

One of the reasons companies are aggressively working and building the cloud computing model is 1) Better accessibility 2) Better resource management 3) Reduced cost of infrastructure 4) Improved performance, etc..

Following is a lit of 10 Web based browser based OS

1. Craythur (http://www.craythur.com/)
2. Desktoptwo (http://desktoptwo.com/)
3. EyeOS (http://eyeos.org/)
4. Glide (http://www.glidedigital.com/)
5. Goowy (http://www.goowy.com/)
6. Orca (http://www.orcaa.com/)
7. Purefect (http://purefect.klorofil.org/demo/)
8. SSOE (http://giffard.dynalias.net/ssoe/)
9. XinDESK (http://www.xindesk.com/)
10. YouOS (https://www.youos.com/)

If that was not enough, Rich Skrenta wrote an article back in 2004 predicting that Google will eventually come up with its own version of Web OS, lets wait and watch.