It makes no sense to me why Chrome OS isn’t based on Android. Maybe there’s a good answer to this, but Google hasn’t given it. Why might Google create two operating systems – Android and Chrome OS – instead of merging their efforts into a single one? “The obvious answer is that the user’s needs, tasks, and interaction methods are so completely different at the two ends of the device spectrum (desktop PCs at one end and small handheld devices at the other) that it’s smart to make two distinct operating systems for these classes of devices.” “Microsoft is an inept comparison in this instance because they’ve created the worst of all possible worlds: a mobile OS that has completely different underpinnings from their desktop OS.” “Apple currently’ve three distinct OSes: Mac OS, the iPhone OS, and the iPod OS. Let’s leave the iPod OS out of this discussion because its feature set and intended utility is such a small subset of the other two that it’s unreasonable to include it. Both the iPhone and Mac OSes share a lot of code and lower-level architecture,” said Kevin Fox.