No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google’s vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently in trouble with antitrust regulators – they’re at different stages of IBM-style thirty years legal epics – that’s just the ticket for them both.

Google’s failure to dent the Microsoft monopoly will simply notch up another failure for Linux (whose fans are quite happy to work for The Man, as long as it’s not the Man from Redmond) – and it’ll do nothing for consumers. How so? Because the computing problems we’ll have tomorrow will still be the same ones we have today.