Dell has been all over the place lately. First we hear a few days ago about Dell actually embracing AMD and now officially starting to offer Opteron-based servers, but now they are also going to be working closely with Google to have software preinstalled on desktops. Particularly, the Google Toolbar, a co-branded homepage and from what I understand Google Desktop search as well, will be included on user machines before they ever reach a desk. Why?

"The real reason we do this is for users," Schmidt said. People "turn the Dell machine on, and everything is integrated right there. (This deal) is a turnkey solution for search."
Microsoft probably isn't happy about this, with IE defaulting to MSN being the home page on freshly installed machines. Google wants to expand this idea, for obvious reasons. In one sense, this seems very good for Google, but in another sense, the last thing a prebuilt machine needs is yet more software bundled with it.