I guess Google has the sheer marketing muscle to compete with Linux in it's many flavors. But Chrome hasn't seen rapid adoption like Firefox, Android didn't exactly catch fire and I don't thing GCOS will catch on fire either. Talk of tablet PC adoption might be as over-rated as WAP (XML/XHTML adoption along with browser tolerance seems to have made that irrelevant). As over-rated as the long-awaited "convergence".

So can they compete with M$ and it's entrenched relationships with device manufacturers? You aren't fighting an operating system so much as M$ Office which is the way the world does business. Then you come up against proprietary document formats. Google knows it can't dance with that devil, so they take it online.

First of all, "open source" as it will be defined won't fool the Open Source community. Unless they literally adopt the GPL framework, hmmm....whatever they come up with for apps would have to be browser compatible by their definition anyway so.....moving on.

Why every corporate security officer in the universe isn't screaming their heads off about all use of Google Docs and collaboration tools is utterly beyond me.

But the greatest flaw is exactly what GCOS seems meant to address: when Gmail goes down, it goes down. It's not there anymore. Unless you are running Google Desktop, and then you might actually have something that REPRESENTS your data. Ha ha ha ha.

Paradoxically, in a digitally-insecure age, security is ultimately found through REGRESSIVE TECHNOLOGIES for most of us. If you don't want information compromised online, don't put it there. There are some things, in an age where we don't have to remember anything (just type it into a calendar app and let it remind you), we are learning some things are better not entered into a computer to begin with, but written down or memorized.

For these and many reasons I'm calling this a non-event.