ReBlogged from Dwayne’s BeyondtheGeek:

Yesterday morning Google surprised us by announcing that their signature products: GMail, Google Docs and Google Calendar amongst others were moving from their (in some case 5 year long) stint as ‘beta’ into ‘finished versions.’ It was an odd, and relatively unexpected move, but in a way it made sense. Google’s about to introduce new products like Google Wave and Google Voice to take the place of the previously mentioned applications and hang out in perennial beta.

Yeah, I know that centering the text was dramatic. But it IS dramatic. On the eve of Microsoft’s comeback from the commercial defeat of Vista with Windows 7, Google made an announcement that splays wide their intentions of providing an operating system designed specifically for netbooks, the fastest growing segment in the laptop space w/ close to 500 million units sold in 2008.

Chrome (the Browser) has already made a play for IE 8′s marketshare, with MS’s dominant browser losing 2% from Q2 to Q3 2009 while Chrome moved upward to 2% from in the seven month stretch from its launch seven months ago. Overall, IE’s decline amongst saavy Internet users has plummeted to almost nothing. Add the fact that everything in the last two years has been moving to the browser, from office suites to moderately powerful web-based image editing. And while next gen phone OSes like Palm’s Pre run on a version of Linux, it’s littered with web tech like CSS, XHTML and JavaScript. But Why stop there?