I found out about http://www.google.com/ig/dell via John Batelle's blog last night. It looks like Google now has a personalized home page for users of Dell computers.

During the Web 2.0 conference, Sergey Brin commented that "Google innovates with technology not with business". I don't know about that. The AdSense/AdWords market is business genius and the fact that they snagged the AOL deal from more experienced companies like Microsoft shows that behind the mask of technical naivette is a company with strong business sense.

If I was competing with a company that produced the dominant operating system and Web browser used to access my service, I'd figure ways to disintermediate them. Perhaps by making deals with OEMs so that all the defaults for online services such as search which ships on PCs point to my services. Maybe I could incentivize them to do this if there is the promise of recurring revenue by giving them a cut of ad revenue from searches performed on said portal pages.

Of course, this may not be what http://www.google.com/ig/dell is for, but if it isn't I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't eventually become the case.