What I was hoping for in asking him those questions was something akin to what he said – either a dissection of art along those lines or a rejection of that notion. I like your separation of our critical and creative sides. The critical hat is something I wear often when breaking down music, even if it’s something that I unequivocally enjoy. I adore power-pop music – it’s one of my favorite genres and it’s something I enjoy no matter how classic or dated it sounds. I do like to look at how things like that stack up in the broader idea of art moving in movements – responding to the art that came before it, whether with or against it. And in that sense, music, I would imagine, moves more along a chronology. The same influences that shaped the power-pop of Big Star are not that same that shape the power-pop of Brendan Benson or Fountains of Wayne or anyone else who lands in a similarly titled genre. They may be making similar art (in a very broad sense), but the pieces that go into it are different and the outcome is as well. That is progress in art in its own way.

What has me confused is why people acted so surprised when they heard about this. Chrome was created with the expressed purpose of making the browser the focal point of a person’s computing experience. And while at the moment, that’s a tall order to fill for a desktop, the netbooks that the initial offering will be catered to are made for this sort of thing. Right now about 80% of netbooks run Windows XP. The other 20% (which happens to be about 20 times Linux’s marketshare on desktops) run Xanadros or Ubuntu or some other Linux flavor. MS is working on making Windows 7 slimmer, but no matter what it won’t make as good use of system resources as Chrome, won’t run on lower-end models, and will carry a higher price due to licensing fees. Out of the gates, Chrome is positioned to dominate the lower price points, at least in terms of quality/price.

Those who are framing this as a question of whether or not Chrome is going to be able to compete in the desktop market are kicking around a straw man. There’s every indication that Google intends to get there eventually, but right now, they see an opening, and they’re going for it, and the only thing that’s going to be a significant barrier to them is the lack of a Microsoft logo on their netbooks, which, yes, is like saying that the only significant barrier to the maiden voyage of the Titanic was an iceberg. But Google is a far more savvy company than the White Star Line.

What amuses me the most is the people who are saying that this is a warning shot in response to Microsoft’s Bing, which will likely never at all challenge Google in terms of function or popularity. As if Google is that petty.

I’m excited. I don’t think that Google is going to come up with something that’ll make me want to replace Ubuntu, but a gouge in Microsoft’s market dominance is a victory for the computer industry at large.