Shoutbox

It's basically cloud services; Google has been pushing that mentality for a while now. If you look at their online applications, they got docs (google docs), calendar (google cal), e-mail (gmail), video and music (youtube), pictures (picasa) search of course. If you notice, they give you 7GB of data, so they expect you to upload everything online. If everything IS online, there's no need to install anything locally.

So the advantage is of course the virus protection (you don't care if it does happen, you'll just flash the image), you don't care about losing data, all software upgrades are done on their server, and well you can use every machine you want, the only thing you need is your e-mail and password.

So it's good, but I don't think it'll really take off until we get some faster internets (at least in Canada) and some damn bandwith that doesn't cost us a leg every month.