Thursday, Google only 100 days after releasing the beta. For many companies that would be normal behavior; for Google, which likes to hang onto the beta tag until its products are wearing Depends, it's radical. Especially since, less than 24 hours after emerging from beta, reports of .

This can mean only one thing, and it's not that Chrome was so fit and finished Google felt nothing more needed to be done. It was to get Chrome out of beta in time for loading onto OEM systems for sale in early 2009.

It's no secret Google and laptops and netbooks, and the only way to wrest real market share from Internet Explorer is to have it pre-installed (sorry Firefox; I love ya, but you'll never be more than a 25 percenter).

This will be the first real test in more than a decade to find out if Microsoft has changed its evil ways. Has it transformed from a take-no-prisoners must-own-every-market monopolizer to a Web 2.0-ish let-give-a-big-group-hug collaborator? Will it vow to "crush" Chrome the way it pulverized Netscape? Will it twist the arms of hardware manufacturers to just say no to Google?

That will largely depend on the answer to a bigger question: Who's really driving the Redmond bus, Steve "The Mad" Ballmer or Ray Ozzie?