Google and Sun
Prediction: Google will buy Sun Microsystems sometime in the next year.
Why? To get into the desktop PC market of course. And what better way to do it than to use Sun’s existing PC manufacturing capabilities combined with their new Global Desktop software. Google will be able to complement these technologies with it’s own unique and highly-scalable online storage and hosting solutions to create the next best thing since sliced-bread.
So, I predict that you will soon be able to buy a Google-branded PC which uses some derivative of Global Desktop to enable a seamless web-desktop (webtop) experience where your data is kept on their servers and can be transparently accessed either through your home GooglePC or a standard web-browser on another machine. Applications such as Office will be pushed out as advanced web-apps (Global Desktop will allow for much richer applications than can currently be offered by AJAX, etc). The whole experience will be seamless - you will never know whether the particular application you are using is running on your local machine or is running on a Google server somewhere over the electronic horizon.
Of course, there will be plenty of people up in arms over privacy concerns, etc. I think, however, that the convenience factor will outweigh the concerns for the average Joe and we will soon see the GooglePC taking on the likes of Microsoft and Dell.