I wonder about the triumphalism of "Chrome as the OS" being a Microsoft killer. For one thing, there's the huge pile of inertia surrounding the installed base of Exchange servers that work with Outlook. That gives you a base of people using Outlook for calendaring and for email, and that ties right into the Office Suite. Mike Arrington thinks this is a potential killer:

Don't worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You've got Zoho and Google Apps. You won't miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

I can address that directly, since I live in a pretty Microsoft-centric company with a Mac. Everyone else uses Outlook and Office; I use the Mac calendar app and iWork. Sure, I interoperate with that stuff well enough, but calendar integration is more like sneaker-net (no one sees my calendar, but I can add meeting notices easily enough). When I get Word docs or PowerPoints, they come in ok, but there are always little conversion artifacts - and that's caused no end of arguments over why I don't "just use PowerPoint like everybody else".

Prospective Google Office users will face all the same hurdles, plus an additional one: my data is all on my Mac, and goes to corporate through the corporate network. Google app data is cloud-native, and while that can be every bit as safe, perceptions are definitely otherwise.

Then there's this from Mike Siegler of TechCrunch:

In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. "It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be." Google writes tonight on its blog.

This represents to me a possible loss of focus. They already had Android, and now they have a second OS effort out there? Sure, this could hurt Microsoft, if Google manages to overcome market inertia. That's a big if, and - in the meantime - I think they might be running too many efforts in this space.

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