Google says Chrome is defensive, but could it be offensive?

NVDL: Google's mantra has always been: first, do no harm.
They may have misconstrued this to mean: first, do not arm. And then chucked those sentiments into the bin (well, certainly the latter).

With Chrome, Google may have begun a software 'arms' race. Whose arms will swing widest - Google or Microsoft? Play is likely to get rough from here on out.

clipped from www.ft.com “It is true that we actually, and I in particular, have said for a long time that we should not do a browser because it wasn’t necessary,” Mr Schmidt said. “The thing that changed in the past couple of years . . . is that people started building powerful applications on top of browsers and the browsers that were out there, in particular in Explorer, were not up to the task of running complex applications.” Mr Schmidt hinted at Google’s long-term aims of challenging Microsoft’s dominant position in corporate software, saying Chrome would be a platform for “powerful industrial apps”. “There is an opportunity for a platform and that platform for running these new applications is something that you can’t really do on IE7, and that’s the argument,” said Mr Schmidt. Mr Schmidt added that Chrome, as an open-source piece of software, could not be used to direct browser traffic to Google’s own internet services.