I’m going to do something I don’t often do on this blog and that is jump on the blogging band-wagon that is the discussion of the Google Chrome OS announced today. From MacWorld to the Washington Post, Google has clearly made an impact on the world with its announcement that it will be working on a new operating system that will largely be centralized around the web and Google’s web browser, Google Chrome. But one idea, that’s been fairly pervasive in the conversation: that file systems and other “onboard” applications might go away—seems to point to a new paradigm to computing, and it’s spawned a lot of metaphors in the discussion. It’s also wrong.

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