As far as can be told from the Journal article, Google has no plans to open its own music store. Along with allowing live streaming, it will provide links to other sites where the song can be bought, possibly even to iTunes. But does that make sense? Why add another middleman? Why share the take between three players -- Google, the record companies and iTunes? If the record studios have already licensed their catalogs to Google, why doesn't Google split the revenue with them?

For anyone else, including Microsoft, the marketing challenges involved with dethroning iTunes as the most popular online destination for listeners willing to pay for music are immense. But not for Google. I search for music on Google all the time -- popping in lyric fragments or band names heard on the radio or in a TV ad. Only then do I head over to iTunes. If Google can subtract a step from that trip, I wouldn't think twice.

The record labels, meanwhile, have made no secret of their desire to get out from under the thumb of Apple. If Google makes this as easy as Google typically tends to do -- look out iTunes.

From the Wall Street Journal (italics mine):

The Mountain View, Calif., company's financial state suggests that online advertising, which has weathered the recession better than many other advertising sectors, could be one of the first areas to recover.

Revenue from U.S. Internet advertising fell 5.3 percent in the first half of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, but some analysts forecast it will start growing again later this year.

Advertising budgets are always one of the first things to collapse when a recession hits; a key reason why advertising-dependent media companies are especially sensitive to the onset of economic downturns. But the fact that online advertising has been performing relatively better than other sectors during this recession makes sense, given the massive shift of attention and eyeballs from traditional forms of media to the Internet.

When the economy recovers, the shift of advertising dollars to the Internet, following those eyeballs, is bound to continue, with more force than ever. Google's ready, but it's not clear that the media business is. Lately, we've been hearing a great many old-school media company executives bemoaning what the Web has done to their business models, but in the near future, if you are not successful on the Web, you won't have a business model, period.

Glyn Moody, writing in ComputerWorldUK, thinks the deal is expensive for Microsoft, but the advantages to the move are obvious. From a financial standpoint, Microsoft can now score bigger advertising deals. From a technical perspective, the key to improving search engine performance is crunching a lot of data on what people are searching for and using that information to refine results. Microsoft now has access to vastly more info on what people are looking for than ever before.

Bing already works pretty well, if your metric of success is that it returns Googlish-looking results. But I'm guessing that Google is unlikely to be alarmed. If anything, the news might even be welcomed by Google, as it shoots a big hole in the theory that Google is the 21st century version of Microsoft, lording it over the Internet universe without any significant competitors in sight.

For Yahoo, it all has to feel a little sad. Long ago, in the prehistory of the Web, as a freelance writer who was pretty excited about this thing called the Internet, I wrote a tiny little squib for Wired magazine, "Yippee for Yahoo," announcing the news that two graduate students at Stanford had received venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Back then, start-ups that got the Web like Yahoo were seen as the anti-Microsoft, and the fact that co-founder David Filo was a free-software geek made it all the better.

From now on, every Yahoo search result will be "powered by Bing."

For Jerry Yang and David Filo, that's gotta hurt.

It is a tribute to Google's extraordinary mindshare that the company's announcement of a new operating system that won't be available for another year spawned an instantaneous outpouring of over-the-top commentary so frenzied that I was immediately flung into a fit of browser-war flashbacks, circa 1995. Google is a much more formidable threat to Microsoft than Netscape ever was, but it is remarkable how similar the contours of the current explosion of hype are to the babble that preceded Netscape's astonishing IPO in August, 1995. The Web, we were told back then, was sure to dethrone Microsoft, and Netscape would be the flagbearer of the revolutionaries.

Netscape got stomped, of course, and Microsoft is still hanging around, dominating the vast majority of computers in use on the planet. So excuse me if I counsel wait-and-see to those who already are imagining Redmond as nothing more than a smoking crater oozing radioactive fallout.

And yet: Anyone old enough to remember the sturm und drang of 1995, but who pays attention to how kids are growing up on the Internet today, has to admit that that while Netscape and scores of other would-be Microsoft competitors lost all their battles, the Web is winning the war. My daughter's first step after turning on the computer is a trip to Facebook. My son's is to a Web-based online gaming network that connects him to all his friends. Both of them have Gmail accounts and neither particularly cares whether they are doing their homework in Google Docs online or Microsoft Word on the desktop. It's all the same to them.

Until the WiFi drops. At which point they become lost souls, cut loose from all online moorings. Dad! The Internet is broken. Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!

No matter what happens to the "Chrome" operating system, Google, so far, is on the right side of history -- provided there's ample Internet connectivity. Microsoft has always tried to figure out how to protect its established business model while venturing onto the Web. But Google is indigenous to the Web. When Microsoft gave away its browser free with every instance of Windows, it was considered an antitrust violation by competitors. But when Google says it plans to give away the entire operating system for free -- no one blinks. The real shocker would be if the company announced plans to charge for Chrome. (And yes, I know, the Justice Department is exploring whether there is a basis for an antitrust case against Google. But not because Google's consumer-facing products are free. That's just taken for granted.)

I will make no speculation as to whether the Chrome OS will succeed in grabbing market share from Microsoft. After all, my daughter wants a Mac Air and my son scoffs at anything that can't run the latest high-end PC game: (Translation: Windows). But they also assume that everything they need should be available to them, for free, when they turn on their computer. If it isn't Google, someone will deliver that to them.

And then there's this, from the original Google announcement:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear -- computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

I've heard those promises before. I'm still waiting. But if Google delivers, the world is theirs. No nuclear bombs required.