Today in Mountain View, Google held a press event to announce details of its upcoming Chrome OS. What it unveiled is an exciting new platform for Web computing that is aimed squarely at consumer netbooks, and has little relevance to businesses today.

In a nutshell, Chrome OS consists of a Chrome browser running on an optimized Linux kernel. It supports only solid-state storage, and with the exception of locally cached user data, all data will be stored in the cloud. It's built to be fast, simple, and secure. It eliminates all local apps (except, of course, for the browser). Let's be perfectly clear: If it's not a Web app, it won't run on Chrome OS. While it doesn't accommodate local storage, it will read from USB storage devices (memory sticks, cameras, etc). It's a promising idea, as long as you buy into the whole Google ecosystem hook, line, and sinker.

Of all the technologies that run your business, chances are good that none impact your company as much as good ol' e-mail. While larger organizations have the hardware, infrastructure, and human capital to manage e-mail in-house, small businesses with tiny to non-existent IT departments don't have that luxury. Here's how to get big-business e-mail efficiency on a small-business budget.

For businesses with five to 25 users, hosting your own mail server just isn't worth the effort and expense involved, and can actually lead to more downtime than going with an outside service. While it can tempting for very small companies to simply rely on free e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, there's something about having your own domain name that makes your business look more legitimate. Using a free e-mail account is a dead giveaway that your organization runs on a shoestring. Fortunately, both Google and Microsoft offer affordable and robust hosted e-mail solutions.

If you use Microsoft Office and you frequently work from different computers, you need to check out the Office Live add-in for Office Live Workspace (currently in public beta). This free online service gives you the ability to store and share up to 5GB of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, and the Office Live add-in incorporates the ability to work with documents in the Office Live Workspace without leaving the comfort of your Microsoft Office app.

The benefits of working with Workspace and its Office add-in are powerful. Without changing the way you work, your documents will follow you whenever you have an Internet connected computer running Office, and if you're away from your own PC, you can still access your stuff from any other machine. Additionally, Office Live Workspace makes sharing documents across the Internet trivial.

Droid was looking like quite the contender with its QWERTY keyboard, 5MP camera, replaceable battery, turn-by-turn GPS and MicroSD slot. Droid and its 854x480 3.7-inch screen promised customers a viable alternative to AT&T's swamped network and the Apple's draconian app policies. Why did it have to spoil a good thing by punishing its Microsoft Exchange users with an additional $15 fee?

Many of us were shocked last week that a company as prominent as Danger, Inc. could make such a rookie mistake by losing the data of T-Mobile's Sidekick customers. As a system administrator, if there is one thing you absolutely have to get right, it's backups. Here are six ways to botch them.

On paper, Verizon's Droid by Motorola seems like it should destroy the iPhone. Its 3.7-inch 480x854 display is dumbfounding compared to Apple's 3.5-inch 480x320 screen. It manages to include a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, yet at 0.54-inches it's scarcely thicker than the iPhone's 0.48-inches. It has a turn-by-turn GPS right out of the box, while the same feature on the iPhone will knock you back an extra $100. Yet, all this is not enough for the Droid to earn the status of "iPhone killer." For that, it will need to rob the iPhone of its customers, and it won't come even close.

Sure, the Droid's 5MP autofocus camera with a flash bests the iPhone's 3.2MP. Sure, it has an SD card slot, and a removable battery. The iPhone has never been a spec sheet standout. There have always been phones with better cameras, keyboards, and more checkboxes on their feature sheets. The iPhone's success has always defied its limitations, and that's due to its refined interface and intuitive and patented gestures.

Apple's new 27-inch iMac is so beautifully designed that it's easy to look past its most glaring defects. Yes, there are other 27-inch displays out there, but I've yet to see one with the 2560x1440 resolution that Apple is offering. This approaches the resolution of 30-inch monitors like the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC, which lists for $1300 and has a resolution of 2560x1600. Given the iMac's $1700 starting price and the fact that its mini DisplayPort can be used as an input, it's possible to think of the 27-inch iMac as a slightly overpriced Apple display that includes a free computer. I almost never say this about Apple products, but this is a great value.

With the release of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions, Microsoft is including a little gift called XP Mode. XP Mode is a virtual machine running Windows XP. I call it a gift since to similarly equip Vista would have incurred the additional cost of a license for XP. Microsoft gives us XP mode as a means to having a fully modern computing environment without having to sacrifice legacy support.

Microsoft's Windows 7 XP Mode has been released to manufacturing and will be available for download on the Window 7 launch date of October 22. XP Mode is an interesting addition to Windows 7 that offers a number of distinct advantages and some limitations.

Last month, Apple took some flak for pushing the iPhone Configuration Utility to Windows users who have the Apple Updater Software installed. The software was utterly useless to the majority of computer users, most of whom don't even own iPhones. This underscores a fundamental flaw in the way that Windows allows third-party software updates to run amok on people's computers. The solution: Provide a universal updater application to control how software developers push updates to users.

There is no reason that we need to have individual updater applications for Windows, Java, Apple, Adobe, McAfee, and untold others, all competing for systems resources and individually popping up to annoy their victims each time the vendor supplies an update. All we really need is one app to manage all updates to all software. Users could configure how applications get updated, what types of updates are permitted, when the updates are allowed to occur, and how notifications appear.