We’d all like a peek inside the mind of Eric Schmidt—beyond just understanding what he’s wearing in his twitter profile picture. Search and maps and profiles: these all make sense. But there are a set projects that Google has been putting out lately that don't fit. They're open source and focused on the client machine.
Some of these are put under the banner of "making the web faster".
Let me go a step further.

Google makes lots of money when you're clicking. The faster and more efficiently you consume their experiences, the more you click. The more you click, the more money Google makes.

But there are bumps along the way.
Crappy ISPs
Out-dated operating system.
Outdated and/or bloated browsers, protocols, and programming languages.

Google was silent on these for a long time--pushing existing technologies in novel or extreme ways--AJAX with Google Maps, Java Web Toolkit for Javascript, even shoe-horning Chrome into IE.

In the end, the've decided to cut out the middle man.

Ponder the stack of technology between you and Google's web offerings. When Eric Schmidt thinks about protocols, operating systems, and browsers--he has the same thoughts as Bill Gates did 20 years ago--about disk drives, CPUs and RAM.

Make them solid. Make them better.

But keep them out of the competitive picture.

Commoditize.

MSFT did it riding a wave of cheap PCs.
GOOG is doing it by riding a wave of free software.