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LOADS of buzz on the Google Chrome OS announcement on the web today. Most likely if you read tech news, you’ve heard about it. Hell if you read any news at all you’ve probably at least seen the headline. Google is adding the Linux Kernel and all if it’s underlying functionality to their open source web browser Chrome.  Chrome, since its inception last summer has already gained an approximated 30 million users (according to the official Google Blog), which accounts for around 6% of the browser market share. Impressive for a browser that’s less than a year old (it beats out Safari, in case you were wondering).

The recent news, which was announced on the Google blog is that Chrome is going to be transitioned into more than just a browser.  Initially, Google’s play here will only target netbooks – devices designed to basically have the web as the OS and therefore, their main functionality is web applications, browsing and email.  This move makes total sense of course, and Chrome will then be well positioned as laptop computers work their way toward a totally web centric operating system.

There are a few issues with the whole idea though – that idea being to marginalize the computer’s operating system (OS) and making the internet the primary computing platform.  If you think about the issue of storage, there is a cost issue currently, and unless Amazon of Google or IBM wants to bring free cloud storage to the table, then I’m still going to keep my 100 GB of music on my local media server here and not pay the $30/month it would cost to store it in Amazon’s S3.  So hard disks aren’t going anywhere for the time being, unless Google comes up with a way around this issue as well (and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did).

I’m not saying that the idea of a purely web-centric PC is going to happen soon, but the idea may be closer than we realize.  Google will certainly ship Chrome computers with the ability to interface with the computer’s devices (it’s using Linux drivers, after all) but the underlying OS likely won’t be able to do much else besides run, well, Google Chrome.  Adobe Air will likely be a critical piece, especially for native Adobe products like Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop.  These products will likely be AIR (or web) based in short order.  Other desktop app mainstays will be forced to adapt or fade with the changing tide (Lotus notes, MS Office, Adobe products, Siebel CRM, etc…there are clearly loads of enterprise desktop applications out there).  There’s also apps like DVD Player and iTunes that aren’t going into the browser anytime in the near future…

But perhaps the most interesting thing about this whole thing (and the part that everyone’s touching on today) is the big middle finger that Google is seemingly pointing right at Microsoft.  In the past 20+ years with the advent of Windows, Microsoft called the shots as the desktop became more and more powerful.  But now with the rise of the web as a platform, Google is positioned to be the one pointing the way forward, which is certainly a big bomb to drop on Microsoft and a clear and present threat.  Now things get interesting.  Here are some other interesting views on the subject:

• Ted Dzubia
• Google Chrome FAQ
• CNet