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It’s not just storage. Programs for word processing and picture editing and other services are all now available online, bypassing the need to buy the box and load it on your PC.

Traditionally Microsoft has not worked this way. It sells software like Nike sells shoes, with big advertising campaigns and boxes on shelves.

Google arrives from the other side of the cloud. It spends little on marketing and has no physical products to sell. Chrome will be free. Google’s bet is that advertising dollars will follow the customers.

“What’s the fundamental message here? There is a technology shift. You could say shift means risk — I say risk means opportunity,” Ballmer said last year. “The real question is not what’s going to happen but who’s going to win and how it’s going to happen.”

Microsoft is sharpening its knives and readying the autumn launch of Windows 7, its latest upgrade. Windows 7 will bring Microsoft closer to the cloud, but the firm is betting that people will still want to work and save their information offline for some time to come.

Google sees it differently and is waiting for its opportunity to strike with the arrival of the new generation of netbooks. “We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better,” Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management, wrote on Google’s blog last week.

“People want to get to their e-mail 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.”

No-one expects Chrome to make much of a dent on Microsoft’s empire from day one. But Google is playing a long game. Analyst Henry Blodget believes Chrome is a “classic disruption” that could eventually topple Windows. “Disruptive technologies do not immediately replace existing technologies because they are better,” Blodget wrote last week.

“In fact, in the beginning, they are worse. They’re just simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. They appeal to the low end of the market (in this case, netbooks), which doesn’t need all the bells and whistles that the high-end needs. They initially gain share in the low end, and the incumbent doesn’t care about losing it because it’s low-margin share.

“But then . . . the disruptive products get better and more fully featured and they begin to migrate up to the mid-market. And the incumbent is forced to retreat to the high-margin high-end. And then, eventually, the disruptive product becomes mass market and the incumbent becomes a rickety old colossus that crashes in on itself.”

THE final decision on who is right will belong to the consumers. And the signs are that for all Google’s popularity, it could face an uphill battle.

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