Google Desktop OS:
Google now has its well-funded mitts on just about every aspect of computing. From Web browsers to cell phones.
Google
Checkout provides an alternative to PayPal. Street View is well on its
way to taking a picture of every house on every street in the United
States. And the fun is just starting: Google's early-beta Chrome browser
earned a 1 percent market share in the first 24 hours of its existence.
Android, Google's cell phone operating system, is hitting handsets as
you read this, becoming the first credible challenger to the iPhone
among sophisticated customers.
What Coming?
The Chrome browser is the first toe
Google has dipped into these waters. While a browser is how users
interact with most of Google's products, making the underlying operating
system somewhat irrelevant, Chrome nevertheless needs an OS to operate.
To make Microsoft irrelevant, though,
Google would have to work its way through a minefield of device drivers,
and even then the result wouldn't be a good solution for people who
have specialized application needs, particularly most business users.
But a simple Google OS--perhaps one that's basically a customized Linux
distribution--combined with cheap hardware could be something that
changes the PC landscape in ways that smaller players who have toyed
with open-source OSs so far haven't been quite able to do.