It's not "How will you spend those seconds," it's "What impulses become reasonable when you can satisfy them in ten seconds instead of forty?"

Twitter is bigger than blogger because tweeting takes seconds and blogs take minutes.

The point is power consumption. If a machine is instant on/off, then there's no reason to ever revert to sleep, which still drains battery.

The only reason we have stepped power consumption modes is because moving from full off to full on is such a pain in the ass.

The solution is to improve sleep mode, not make it faster to boot up. We're past the point now when anyone should turn their computer off in daily use, any more than they manually power down their cell phone or MP3 player.

Fast boot + no client-side state => you can turn the damn thing completely off without worrying about losing your setup => longer wall-clock battery life.

Lets say I have a series of installs to do that require rebooting.

There are 10 boots total (New machine, lots of corporate software, probably poorly made!).

400s v 100s.

Or 1m v 5m.

Now spread that over say, 400 computers (New corporate office, new equipment).

(40 * 10) * 400 = 160,000s, or 2666m, or 44hr.

Vs

(10 * 10) * 400 = 40,000s, or 666m, or 11hrs

In short: Perspective, dude.

You're not going to be installing any corporate software on a Chrome OS computer though. Also, why aren't you booting computers concurrently in your hypothetical?

Hehe. Find me a corporate company that wants to put all their stuff on Google. Google Enterprise is one thing. ChromeOS is another.

If you think Google wont make this incredibly enticing to companies, you're a fool and probably would have scoffed at the idea of Adsense ten years ago.

Yes I would have. Mainly because no company would have been able to make it work back then. No one even thought of Adsense 10 years ago. You do realize the whole reason Omid is a billionaire is because he was the one of the first main marketers for the company and he was a new employee 10 years ago.

Oh come on, there is no way even Google would be able to convince companies to migrate their data to cloud storage. Atleast not in the next few years.