April 23, 2008 12:54 PM PDT

Google: No plans for desktop operating system

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Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks)

Update: I listened again and got the actual quotation.

Google has never expressed much enthusiasm for getting into the desktop operating system, but some might wonder if the company has updated its thinking, now that it's trying to spearhead the Android project to bring an operating system to mobile phones.

The answer: Nope.

"We don't have any plans to build an operating system," Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said on Wednesday during in an call-in show, KQED's Forum with Michael Krasny.

The comment came in response to a caller who praised Google's open-source work and asked if it planned anything like Red Hat's Linux operating system for desktop computers that would compete directly with Microsoft Windows.

Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank.

Topics:: Google,; Open source

Tags:: Google,; operating system,; open-source

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