Google isn’t telling me any secrets about its plans for Chrome OS. Indeed, I don’t even have one of the 60,000 or so people that Google has given a Cr-48 Chromebook prototype to play with. Even so, unlike my good friend Mary Jo Foley, I think I know exactly who Google has in mind for its Chrome OS Linux desktop system.
I see Google as targeting two different, very different, audiences with Chrome OS. The first group are office workers. The other is those hundreds of millions, perhaps a billion plus, users who really don’t know the first thing about to use a computer safely even as they use them every day.
In this set-up, a company would pay Google a fee, just as some do now for Google Apps for Business. In return, the company gets the 21st century version of a thin-client desktop.