“A real rival to Windows.” “Google drops a nuclear bomb on Microsoft.” It all sounds so dramatic and exciting, the kind of story we journalists love. But I can’t help feeling most of the coverage of Google’s announcement of its Chrome operating system missed the real point.

Most people seem to assume that the Chrome operating system is intended to replace Windows on personal computers, and that it will be a failure if it doesn’t. Many people also believe that Google is either off its rocker in jumping into operating systems or doing it out of spite for Microsoft. Although Google may well be overreaching here, and it faces many challenges in creating and getting support for a new operating system, I think those assumptions are largely flawed.

It’s an easy story to pit Google against Microsoft, partly because there’s some truth to the increasing tension between the two tech titans. But they’re each representative of a bigger battle going on, one that would happen regardless: the inexorable migration of computing (except for the interface to the computer you need to put your fingers on, of course) from the desktop and laptop to the Internet.

Essentially, Google is attempting to create an operating system tuned to the needs of the Post-PC Age, as my former colleague Richard Brandt, author of the book Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain, puts it. That age has not arrived yet, and it may not arrive completely for a long time, but the trend is apparent: People increasingly are doing more and more of their work online, for which they don’t need or want the cost and performance overhead of a traditional PC operating system. That goes double for the vast majority of people around the world who have no PC at all—and something cheap beyond a cell phone that gives them the full experience of the Web would open up a vast new population of Web users.

And the bottom line is that anything that makes it easier for all those people to use Google services and view its advertising helps Google.

First of all, let's put to rest the notion that Google expects to replace Windows, at least anytime soon. "It's not a direct assault on Windows at all," says Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett. "Chrome OS will be streamlined and tuned for interacting with online services and the personal cloud."

In other words, it's intended at least at first to provide an additional option for the increasing number of people who do most of their work online to do so quickly and cheaply. What would a personal computer outfitted with Chrome OS look like? Michael J. Miller at PCMag.com has an idea:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/07/googles_chrome.html