Steve Rubel reports that Dell is now using Google’s personalized home page as the default start page on their shipping home systems. Dell isn’t the only company Google has this kind of deal with.

You would be surprised at just how many people never change the default home page. You would be surprised at just how many people don’t know how to change the default home page. So this is a major coup and a lot more eyeballs.

Now Google lets you download a suite of their products and partner products in one gulp. Windows XP only, of course. Detect a trend with this? By the way, it’s worth noting that Google is including a free six month subscription of Norton AntiVirus 2005. Very interesting. For a company whose mantra is “be less evil” getting in bed with Symantec doesn’t jive with that. There are freeware virus scanners out there. Some are quite good, I hear.  Why Symantec, I wonder? What happens after 6 months? Have you ever tried uninstalling a Norton product? It’s not for the newbie heart.

I’m not saying it’s all bad that Google is taking over, just worth note that it’s happening.

Personally, as good as Google’s personalized start page is, it doesn’t compare with Netvibes which keeps getting better and better. Not only is Netvibes my start page on my computer, but I can go to any other computer and log in and get an instant snapshot of what’s going on in the world, including the latest email messages in all my accounts.