This analysis is sorely lacking perspective. I could pick on a bunch of things but I'll just choose one to make my point.
Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.
I'm glad you said it because to be honest I was thinking the same thing and was worried about getting flamed. But I'm with you.
After reading this my first thought was "Has the NY Times come to the point where their space is worth so little that they'll just let Cringley ramble on for a couple pages?" There's virtually no real insight here. Just a bunch of random observations from a guy whose been out of the loop for more than a decade.
Not even the PR implications, but just the security/technical. How does an OS vendor block access to a website? Deny it in the hosts file? Add a default firewall rule? Code a special case in IE?
Any such incident would cause irrevocable damage with any government/enterprise and push them to abandon the platform entirely. As you say, it's just absurd.
Like a computer where you can only buy apps from a single site owned by the maker and only connect to the net through a single service provider - no consumer would ever go for that.
Absurd? Ludicrous? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but if you look at Microsoft's long track record of harming consumers, I wouldn't bet the farm against it.
Let me see... how about not supporting HTML5? That would pretty much kill all of the new Google products for 70% of the PC market... And it's not immediately grounds for an anti-trust lawsuit.
Cringely's assertion that Google should fear making Google search not work on Windows PCs is ludicrous. Period. Anyone who seriously thinks any broadly successful (public) company would pull a stunt like that and piss off the vast bulk of their users has lost touch with reality.