By Erica Ogg
Thursday, July 09 2009 09:27 AM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/business/0,39044229,62055856,00.htm

Though many PC makers were quiet about Chrome OS earlier Wednesday, Google has now named the companies it's working with to bring its operating system to netbooks next year.

In a post to the Chrome blog Wednesday afternoon, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai said the company is working with a variety of PC and chipmakers, and another software company. Those include Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.

ZDNet Asia's sister site CNET News reported earlier Wednesday that Asus and Lenovo were thought to be working with Google on Chrome OS. Asus was an easy one to guess since it's the pioneer of the Netbook category and has shown its willingness to work with other operating systems outside of Windows.

Acer also sounds right since it's the fastest growing laptop maker, and has shown a lot of flexibility in pricing models to move Netbooks off store shelves. HP, of course, is the world's largest provider of PCs and should be part of any conversation about consumer computing OSes.

The one that is notably missing is Dell. Dell is the second-largest PC maker in the world (though Acer is close at its heels), but didn't indicate it was actively working with Google on this when contacted earlier today. The company would only say that "Dell constantly assesses new technologies as part of managing our product development process and for consideration in future products."

This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.