Google is doing everything possible. Google is taking all steps possible to glue people's eyeballs to their web pages. To do so they compete with their main comparator in this arena, Microsoft who is also trying to glue people's eyeballs to their web properties while at the same time trying to guarantee the survival of their desktop revenue.

From Our Past Experience we cn notice that everything that Google does with Gmail, Google apps, Google Voice, Google Wave etc. is aimed at getting people to spend as much time as possible on the Google web pages. All of this so visitors can spend more time watching the ads that Google puts on there and can generate maximum revenue possible.  The Google app strategy for example, is aimed at getting people to put their word, excel and powerpoint documents on the Google website (so they will spend more time there), but by doing so they started to compete head-on with Microsoft Office.

Microsoft is retaliating by integrating their new Win7 operating system tightly with their Azure cloud offering. With Win7 and the new release of Office your documents will automagically flow between your desktop and your Azure cloud account. So the only way that Google can counter this attack is by providing people with their own Chrome browser and Chrome operating system. Just like Microsoft they are partnering with the hardware vendors who are very willing to ditch Microsoft  after so many years of being controlled by them.

The Google Chrome operating system along with the Google Chrome browser is another major step towards the empty PC: a PC/laptop/netbook that only has enough software to get you online and that doesn't store any data itself, all the data and application are in the cloud.