Interesting.

I think the UK has a long way to go in improving broadband and wireless coverage before we'll be able to rely on an 'online' operating system.

Also I have to say that alot of people have hangups about having personal information online, e.g. household bills, banking documentation, medical information etc.

I think it will be used, but for the forseeable future, by a limited number of people.

It will fall flat on it's face I think. People have been there before google and tried to compete. It just doesn't happen. And to be honest, with the amount of my personal information google has already. I don't particulaly like the idea of them having every single item on my PC in their servers. They already have my Emails, what I search for, where I live and everything else.

I think they may have missed the market with this one.

Some people will like it 'because it's not Microsoft' and will think that somehow that makes them cool without having to get into Linux.

A lot of people won't like it, because they'll be mistrustful of their data being stored remotely. Despite years of experience to the contrary, they'll believe that Google is more likely to lose their data or 'go down' than their home PC is.

And is the netbook going to be the future? As Jobs said, their not better at anything. He's got a point.
Are we really all going to migrate to fiddly little things with ****e battery life that we can't even store data on?

I'm not completely sure about the iPad yet, but I think it will evolve like the iPhone did. Even if it doesn't, I think it will have a lot of people (probably Google too) thinking twice about how we surf the net.

My personal, and entirely uninformed, feeling is that we'll end up stuck with the home PC/laptop for a while now while mobile computing will develop into something that isn't a netbook with Chrome on it.

I won't be using it. And if Microsoft decides they want to do the same, then I'll be using my old trusty disk-based OSes for years to come.

In the UK we are lagging behind in broadband speeds and reliability. It would take billions to get the UK up to speed and the ISP's simply won't invest that kind of money so cloud computing is some way off being useable in the UK at least.

This.