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That's the idea of cloud computing as I understand it....big question as to how popular it gets...might make sense for very mobile people....which does not include me....

But I heard Schmidt interviewed on CNBC from the Sun Valley conference this last week and I think where Google is going is wanting to be connected to the wave of very mobile customers with their mini devices that have access to the web.

Chrome is simply a way to supply that at very low cost.

So their business plan is to make money off of the advertising....not hardware or operating systems....that will give $MSF some real competition....

Right now, there are three basic OS models. MS, OSX and Linux. OSX is tied to the hardware, so the market % is limited to people who both want and can afford Apple products. Linux is niche and probably always will be, as there's no overriding distribution that people can settle on. MS currently has most hardware vendors under a barrel. Mike Dell begged Jobs to license OSX to Dell. He did this because he realized that MS views hardware manufacturers as extensions of MS. He's also seen MS kneecap too many "partners" to trust them, anymore. If a hardware manufacturer upsets MS and they have no alternative OS. You don't even have to upset MS. They just need to see a way to become more profitable by kneecapping you. Check out all their "plays for sure" partners.

MS may be a little less inclined to strong arm hardware manufacturers since they've been hit with so many lawsuits, and that leaves an opening for an OS like Chrome, particularly in netbooks where functionality is somewhat limited.

What scares MS more than anything else is the possibility of there being an alternative OS for Dell, H-P, Sony, and other hardware manufacturers to use. MS killed Netscape by offering their browser for free and including it with the OS. If Google can create an OS that they can distribute for free that works pretty seamlessly on less powerful devices, MS could have a big headache.

Many hardware manufacturers view MS as the devil they have to deal with to stay in business, and if MS ever gets down, there'll be a bunch of people jumping on the corpse.

Most people don't use fifteen percent of their computer's capabilities. Word, Excel and Outlook are bloated far beyond the needs of most people. A light streamlined OS could be very popular, particularly if it wasn't tied to a hardware platform like OSX is tied to the Mac hardware.

Google's biggest problem is that designing a functioning OS is a heck of a lot more complicated than most people think. It's particularly challenging when dealing with a less powerful hardware platform. There are all kinds of trade off decisions on capabilities vs. computing power. Google will, IMHO, find out that creating a platform that can compete with MS or OSX will be a taller order than they think.