Oh that is sweet! Google was finally waking up to the patent reality after 2007 and encouraging folks to file patents on their projects. (I've got one filed for a laser pen pointer toting telepresence robot somewhere out there) It looks like Jeff took his ideas and sent them into the patent guys who dutifully filed them and voila, "invention" of ChromeOS without having written a single line of code of it :-)
Reading through the claims it does look like ChromeOS uses those concepts so I guess Jeff gets the last laugh after all.
I tend to agree that Google doesn't file enough patents.
For such an innovative company, with hundreds of different products in several industries, and many of the best and brightest employees anywhere, their patent portfolio is miserable.
Regarding, "It looks like Jeff took his ideas and sent them into the patent guys who dutifully filed them and voila"
Well, for one, this wasn't just "ideas". I created an operating system and used it myself for over a year, pitched it to management, sent it to a company wide email list, and got head count assigned to the project.
Aside from that, Google has been very contemplative about what patents to file or not file.
Without going into any great detail, I wrote 2 patents on my Google OS operating system - and only the one was ever perfected.
I wrote 3 or 4 other patents on unrelated projects that were all filed as provisional patents and allowed to expired.
At least 1 of the expired provisional patents was very, very commercially valuable, in my opinion, but Google apparently did not recognize that.
Reading through the claims it does look like ChromeOS uses those concepts so I guess Jeff gets the last laugh after all.