• Windows 7 is Not Vista: I agree, Windows 7 is going to do much better in the marketplace than Vista did, but the strengths of Windows 7 are not going to be on netbooks, but on high speed computers that have processing power to spare for all of the nice new features the OS offers.
• Microsoft is working on its own browser-based OS: Microsoft May be conducting research into new browser technologies and implementations, but they will never commit to a complete browser-based operating system, and that is because with a browser-based system, programs no longer become platform specific. Suddenly nobody needs Windows to run Microsoft Office, a majority of games, and nearly all business apps, and Microsoft loses.
• Google will be busy competing with Ubuntu: You seem to suggest that Google only has the capacity to fight a single-front war. To be sure, Google will be trying to leverage market share from Ubuntu, but I can imagine it won’t be any larger priority than Windows. Google wants market share, plain and simple, and that share is found down the path of least resistance. Ubuntu has a solid netbook implementation, while Windows does not. Google recognizes this and will target those users first (all the while pointing out that ChromeOS is a lot more free than Windows).
• Fully web-based Chrome OS cannot run Windows apps: This is true, but when you think about it, how well does Windows on a netbook run Windows apps? It’s a slow platform that offers sluggish results, unless you stick to things like Office and the web. Netbooks are aimed at people who want to do word processing, web browsing, and watch the occasional movie, and with HTML5, Google can do all of those things in a browser with minimal effort.
• Google has not succeeded against Microsoft in the past: *cough*choke* I’m sorry what? Google hasn’t succeeded in the past? Google search? Gmail? Chrome? Google search has clearly surpassed Microsoft’s search offerings, and while Gmail and Chrome currently have smaller market share than the Microsoft equivalents, look at the history of each: Hotmail launched in 1997, while gmail opened to the public in 2007. In 2 years, gmail’s number of registered users has reached half of what Hotmail’s have reached in 12. As for Chrome, yeah, it has low market share, but it was released less than a year ago and has already taken share from IE, a browser that comes preinstalled on 90% of computers sold in the last ten years.

Edit: Misattributed the original article. This has been fixed

My question is this: when these users consented to have their data sent to a third party when they signed up for whatever it was they signed up for, how many of them thought it meant they would just get added to some advertiser’s mailing list and how many of them actually knew that they would be sharing their financial data with Google and anyone else who wanted to pay for it? How many of them signed up on sites with the checkbox to allow this data to be used in an out of the way place so that it was checked by default and they didn’t see it to change it?

It is well within Google’s rights to keep stats and usage data on all of its websites. I don’t personally have a problem with some computer algorithm searching through my gmail in order to target ads to the contents of those e-mails. I start to take issue, however, when I can unknowingly authorize Google to be able to track me across the web and look at my personal financial history. Sure it is a computer that is looking at everything as I do it, but what’s to stop a Google employee from pulling up the history from that computer? When does it stop being a help to me as a consumer and a danger to me as a free citizen?