The happy drones at the Googleplex never tire of expanding their employer’s imprint on the internet. Work on a new operating system brings the reality of “cloud computing” and Google’s dominance of it a lot closer. Consumers should be excited – and a bit nervous.

Google’s decision to develop its Chrome browser into a Linux-based operating system is no surprise: the company has long coveted Microsoft’s influence on how computing is done. More fundamentally, it is a logical consequence of increasingly feasible cloud computing, where software applications and data reside on web servers rather than users’ computers.