Pretty much every tech writer in the universe over the past couple of days has been weighing on how Google’s Chrome OS announcement will affect their little corner of the world, and I am certainly not going to be an exception. And I don’t feel like I have to leap very far to do it, either. Let’s see, a platform that will allow you to more or less ignore the OS and let all your interaction take place over the Internet via the browser? Just about anyone who remembers the heady early days of Java will have had a sense of deja vu. In fact, the very first time I encountered Java was in 1997 or so, when my roommate and I connected via Netscape and a 28.8 dial-up modem to a browser-based Word processor written in Java — and you could argue that Google Docs is distant descendant.Kudos to Venutrebeat.com’s Dean Takahashi for pointing out that, back whe I was watching characters appear in my browser as I typed with a certain degree of skepticism, current Google CEO Eric Schmidt was Sun’s CTO. Takahashi digs up a 1995 interview with Schmidt in which he discusses his view that the Internet will make the OS obsolete. It’s impossible to know if he’s held this idea tight to his chest all these years, or if this is just an inevitable shift that Schmidt was among the first to see, but it’s definitely an interesting historical note.We could debate long and fruitlessly whether Java’s failure to become Chrome OS (which might itself be a failure) is a result of Sun’s missteps or the immaturity of the 1990’s computing infrastructure. But, if Chrome OS and things like it become popular, what place does Java have? Well, while the details aren’t out, it seems to me that Chrome OS, though based on Linux, will really be just the browser — there won’t be any other standalone apps running. Google is telling folks to write standards-based Web apps for it; does that mean that you’ll be able to write Java Plug-in code and have it run? The presence of Adobe among Google’s partner apps on this indicates that there will be plug-ins running, so that might be possible. Remember too that the Google App Engine platform now supports Java. And of course Java on the server side drives a huge number of Web apps — but that’s a venue in which it’s been fighting with PHP and the like for a while now. In other words, network computing is good for Java on the server the way it’s always been — but no better, and it may not be good for Java forever. Software DevelopmentJavaTechnology Industry