Mr. Beal's cleverly named businessweek.com piece, Why Chrome Won't Crash Windows, misses a key point in understanding Chrome's importance. First, a quote:

It's our infatuation with the Google brand, more than the technology inside, that will boost Chrome's market share and further extend Google in our daily Web activities. As for being a Windows or Internet Explorer killer, don't count on it.


Did Gmail kill Hotmail? Will Google Docs kill Office? Did Google kill Yahoo? How about Google Reader -- it's killed nearly every stand-alone RSS reader I've tried.

Now each of these use the browser as their host platform. I've already shown Chrome's ability to take Google Reader offline. Does Firefox do this? Not yet...

If Chrome can extend Gmail, Reader, Docs, Maps, search, Scholar, Books, etc etc etc onto your desktop, the OS will finally become a commoditized complement. This kills Windows. Rather, it negates the advantage one OS has over another, in large and almost exclusive part.

Again, Google is with chrome making Java's play, and they are, to date, doing it successfully. There's more than just a cute icon to be gleaned from Google's portrait of Java applets as a bunch of dancing moons. What Google is saying is that where Sun failed so miserably and laughably in Web 1.0, Google's winning in version two.

Google is killing the OS in ways Sun wanted to with Java and couldn't. It'll be interesting to see if Google can succeed.

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