But where Google Wave has elicited a lot of confusion and snark--personally, I think it's a solution in search of a problem--Chrome OS is eminently sensible. Computers have entrenched themselves in our life like no other technology: I look around the café I'm sitting in and I see a dozen people on their laptops, a ubiquity that could only have been dreamt of by, say, makers of portable televisions.

It may still be a long way off, but Chrome OS certainly has the potential to disrupt the OS market. Netbooks--and don't forget the operative part of that moniker is "net"--have rapidly gained in popularity over the past couple years and an OS built specifically for the hardware makes a compelling argument over the current leader in that market which, lest you forget, is still Windows.