Android and ChromeOS will converge.

Like all ostensibly sensible ideas, this is probably a bad one. The whole point of Android and ChromeOS, right now, is that they're "playful experiments", tweaking Microsoft's tail, exploring new markets. There's no point Google having a big, boring engineering consolidation project to bring them together. That's just going to alienate internal developers ("but this is my baby!") and confuse third-party developers ("shall we wait for the convergence?").

Better to have a reasonably decent Android emulator running on the ChromeOS machine so that Chromebooks can run Android apps.

Update : read the comments on this blog-post. ("this blogpost" meaning this one, on Platform Wars). Lots of good discussion there.

Tim O'Reilly :

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

Update : don't miss this analysis of Google's "less than free" model and mapping data too.

Good overview of smart-phone market in light of latest Droid phone.

Pundits seem to agree : motorola + android == win. Bad news for RIM, Palm and Nokia.