I don't think Apple/iPhone has enough market share to make a proprietary internet very viable outside of the Internet itself. To me, that sounds like an AOL in 1995 kinda thing.

Cross platform development? Not really. Google isn't focusing on bringing applications to Linux. They just want another way to distribute Chrome. The non-IE browsers already have enough market share to force developers into supporting them.

I don't think that Google OS will be much more than the crappy thing that comes (came?) with Asus's netbooks.

The argument is that what they're doing is quietly building a proprietary corner of the internet, not that they've already built one. Googling reveals that 37 million iPhone/iPod Touches had been sold up to the end of the second quarter of 2009. Apple could very easily end up owning the internet for handheld devices, given that the iPhone is the most popular single model of phone, they have 20% of that market by total volume and those numbers are dwarfed by the iPod Touches, which lead the MP3 market — where none of the other mobile app stores even have a presence. They've also started to introduce network features that don't port directly to other architectures, such as peer-to-peer discovery (including via ad hoc Bluetooth networks). There's a real risk of lock-in.

Chrome OS needs to be just enough to support Chrome (the browser); everything else is supposed to run inside the browser, on Google's servers. Which means they can:
- Put ads in all your documents, applications, atc. if they choose to
- Control the software you're using
- Automatically analyze your documents, e.g. to provide yet more customized ads (just like they do with gmail and your search history already)

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your ideas on privacy, useability, advertising, and some more.

According to the whole cloud computing thing. As long as everything runs inside the browser, the OS is relatively meaningless, and you don't need to install anything except an OS with a working internet connection and a browser. With well-written software, the user experience and performance is probably still far from that of applications running locally, but it may be within the realm of "acceptable for average non-techie users", and the huge advantage (again, for average non-techie users) is that you'll never have to install or update anything yourself again, won't have to worry about disk space, backups, hardware requirements, and so on - your cloud computing provider (read: Google) is supposed to do all that for you.
I think I have listed the most important downsides (apart from user experience and performance) in my previous post.

From what I read, the Google OS boots directly onto a browser. It is much like Windows booting directly onto Internet Explorer, but instead of iexplore.exe you boot google-chrome.exe or whatever.

Also, I wonder if they will start sending your machine pages to parse, or use it as a googlebot to parse pages for their search...

I think if they managed to create the holy grail of cross platform development libraries for writing portable GUI applications between Windows and GC OS (and others) they might start to make a dent in MS desktop market share. But that could all take some time... Or maybe a library that allows developers to compile most Windows applications for GC OS without modification would provide a better solution...

In any case I'd much rather have many options to choose from when it came to running my essential applications then to just be stuck with one forever because my applications will only work with it...

It will be interesting to see where the new Google Chrome ends up and how it effects the competition If I had the source I'd definitely start tweaking, but the same goes for Windows...

Google ships Europe a blank CD.

The funny part is europe didn't force them to remove the browser. MS did it on their own before anything happened.

It is funny considering what you said

Quite apart from the observation already made that if you believe Europe is forcing Microsoft to ship without a browser then you're a sucker for Microsoft's PR, exactly how competition law would apply in this case is without precedent, given that the Google product is not only free but of a category of products that is usually free. And it's not the bundling of a free product with a commercial product, it's an entirely free product.

However, I think the most significant observation is that Google have said that the browser is the OS. You can't unbundle the browser because it's the very nature of what is being given away, the one single thing that people buying the relevant computers are interested in. Even if the EU were in the habit of telling people to unbundle browsers — which they're currently not — I think they'd leave Google alone.

Without having looked very firmly at the case, I'll bet that the EU has found Microsoft in breach owing to court procedure being that first you determine if there is a culpable act, then if so determining a remedy. It'd be like if someone was found guilty of shoplifting and told to return to the court the next day for sentencing, went around telling everyone he was going to cut his hands off to remedy the stealing situation and then got his friends to tell everyone how outraged they are that the court is going to cut this guy's hands off.

I own a G1(HTC Dream) and with every major android update the phone seems to take longer to boot up.
I think it's funny because my phone can do so much more than a normal phone can, but at the expense of doing things as well as a normal phone can.

The mini operating systems like android are bound to start catching on but I don't think they are going to replace laptops/desktops for the majority of people. There is just going to be another player in the computer market in general.

For instance. Laptops, as good as they can be, haven't and simply can't replace a desktop computer. Netbooks and smart phones, as good as they can be, probably won't replace laptops. It basically comes down to, these mini computers will just be another computing devise that I'll wont to own. Another "tool for the job."
After I get dressed each morning I'll look at my desktop, my laptop, my netbook, and my phone and think, "To what level of computing will I need to do today." If there isn't much than my phone will suffice. If there might be a lot then perhaps the laptop. And if I'm just planning to stay home then I'll be on my desktop.

Which brings me to my point. The real "killer" app that is going to modify the general computing market is the data managing app.
Just like TV's as more an more people own and relied on a TV for their day to day life, families commonly owned more than one television.
It's becoming common now for families to own more than one kind of computer. This complicates things as data becomes mixed on more than one system. Which computers have which files, or which file is newer?
ChromeOS would be smart to try and make their priority to sync up as much of this stuff as possible.
I'd love to take a peek at the same documents on my phone that I made on my desktop without having to copy the latest version of the documents to my phone first.

The reason Google has a big opportunity to pull something like this off in front of them, is because they actually have the infrastructure in place.