Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.

So writes John Gapper, the fine columnist for The Financial Times in today’s paper. Chrome, of course, is Google’s new browser, which is pretty explicitly designed to be a Windows killer. As Mr. Gapper notes, that precise fear–that an Internet browser could become such a powerful platform for applications software that it would effectively take over the function of the operating system–is what caused Microsoft to start the browser wars in the 1990s, effectively putting Netscape out of business.

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Phew. Apple Inc.’s iconic Chief Executive Steve Jobs does not have a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer he successfully battled four years ago.

At least that is what investors learned by reading the New York Times, in an odd culmination of events that started last week, after Apple (AAPL) reported its second-quarter earnings and an analyst gently asked about Jobs’s health on the conference call.

Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer’s reply that Jobs “has no plans to leave Apple” and that his “health is a private matter” did nothing to assuage investors’ fears that the legendary CEO could be ill again, based on his gaunt appearance at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June and renewed media speculation last week.

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Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent. … At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back.

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Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This may seem like an odd way to characterize a company that just announced its willingness to plunk down $44.6 billion to make its first hostile takeover ever. A company that will probably generate somewhere around $60 billion in revenue when its fiscal year ends in June. A company whose market share in its two core products is still so high–despite recent inroads by a certain flashy competitor–that it qualifies as a monopoly.

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Big games tomorrow. Green Bay against the Giants at Lambeau Field. New England versus San Diego in Foxborough. Winners go to the Super Bowl. Big, big games.

Do you want to go to one of them? Seriously. Even though the first kickoff is less than 36 hours away, I’ll bet you could. Late Thursday evening, I checked StubHub, the leading vendor of tickets in what’s now called the secondary market. “No Risk Playoff Tickets” screamed the site’s headline.

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