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LAST MONTH, WHEN GOOGLE ENGINEERS announced they were working on an operating system designed for the Internet, you might have thought the news was going to transform Redmond and Mountain View into armed camps overnight. Headlines on some of the tech blogs were exuberant and incendiary. TechCrunch.com bannered: "Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft--And It's Made of Chrome." The New York Times was much more subdued ("In Chrome, Hints of a Real Rival to Windows"), but the correspondents Miguel Helft and Ashlee Vance explained, "With the software, Google is mounting a blunt challenge to the dominance of Microsoft, whose Windows operating system runs about 95% of PCs."
