A Future Changed by Google: Old Steps in a new Dance?

Hello and welcome (back) to my blog!
According to an article on Cnet.com that was published last Monday, Steve Jobs stated that we are, at least according to him, approaching the “post-PC era”. Even though smart phones and tablet devices like the Apple iPad might support this statement, Google may have a more lasting impact.

Matt Asay, who is currently COO at Canonical Ltd. (the company behind the Linux distribution Ubuntu) wrote the following about that on his blog recently (June 2, 2010):

Given the fact that so much of Google's development is in open source, and all of their line of business apps are cloud-based, it stands to reason that given the bleeding edge levels of open source adoption which the company enjoys, they can very easily transition its internal desktop users to both Mac and Linux.
(...)
While open-source software has outpaced and perhaps helped to fuel a general technology recovery, Google's adoption of open source is unique and unparalleled. No one uses and creates more open-source software than Google. The company even manages its highly proprietary Macs with an open-source configuration management tool called Puppet.

Let me state that Google likely can't change the answer on the question "What should a desktop OS look like?". However, it is defining the future of that desktop in a way that may have a stronger influence than the iPad from Apple. Key words: Android and Chrome. Both are open-source initiatives by Google that will be a more significant factor in many people's computing experience. On smart phones, those customers will use Android to check their Gmail in-boxes, do searches with Google's search engine, and whatever else people may do on smart phones (and in this case I don't mean calling someone). On their PCs, a growing number of people use Chrome as their web browser, with which they (as you probably already guessed) use Gmail as their web-mail service, use the aforementioned search engine to find the web content they are looking for, share their pictures with Picassa, blog on Blogger, etcetera.
Google has probably got the success it has got, by using the same trick as it's rival from Redmond: bring a product on the market, get users comfortable with it and release another product with which the same is done. Repeat this several times and it is almost guaranteed that the customers are being locked-in.
So this may be a rather new dance, but I can recognise some old steps. I suppose that certain things might never change.

But now, if you don't mind it, I will do just one more thing before I close Firefox: that is checking my web-mail on GMX.