This are my thoughts on the The Register article
First a disclaimer, i use and love open source software, as a matter of fact most of the stuff i deal with is open source.
Proof that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t punch him in the dick without being brought up on assault and battery charges. I’m sure that Linus is pleased to see that his decades of research into operating systems amounts to nothing more than a big ol’ bag of drivers for getting people to Twitter faster.
Why is Linus singled out here? In recent years he barely wrote any code. Also, what is linux if not “big ol’ bag of drivers” (well, technically it is also the standard tools, compiler toolchain…) ? As far as end user is concerned that is exactly what it is.
Ah, yes. Corporate IT workers everywhere have to port decades of esoteric business logic codified into Excel macros to Google Spreadsheets, but the real problem is, what are they going to do after lunch? Have you ever tried to use Google Docs for any serious task? In the words of a true hacker, it’s like trying to build a bookcase out of mashed potatoes. The Microsoft Office institution will not easily be overthrown by a bunch of jokers writing JavaScript.
The author does have a point that Google Spreadsheets are not as sophisticated as Excel, however they do suffice for majority of use cases. The jokers writing JS? Two mistakes in a single statement 
. The joker happen to be the authors of the worlds most scalable system and they write Java (comipiling it to JS with GWT).
But it’s not just Office that will keep Microsoft’s hold on the PC market. Can you replace Active Directory with a web app? Is there a site I can visit to connect to my office’s shared printer? What do you mean World of Warcraft doesn’t run in the browser? How do I play a DVD in Google Chrome?
As far as traditional desktop stuff, ala browse files and play DVD’s is concerned, i bet google will make that run through web browser as well. Since they control both hardware and the browser bridging the worlds is not a big issue. As far as AD is concerned, web based OS obsoletes most of the need for it. As you have logins centralized to whatever web app you are login in to and the files can easily be hosted there as well.
Keep whackin’ away on that Pareto Principle and let us all know how it turns out. In the meantime, I’m going to go play a few rounds of Counterstrike on my Windows-based PC, because the best that my browser can do is Tetris. I’m sure that HTML5 will bridge that gap any day now.
Well, try better, say quake? I do agree that there is significant gap between the PC gaming and browser based gaming, but not as big as tetris -> CS.
The notion that Google Chrome OS is going to take any serious market share away from Windows is a product of the pathological Silicon Valley attitude that newer is always better, even if nothing has changed.
Do i smell Silicon valley complex here? 
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