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« The 2 Magics and the Hype Cycle | Main | The Gold in Chrome »
Google Chrome
So, Google takes another step towards its mission to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ with the launch of Chrome – Google’s open source browser.
For some, this is a flash back to the late 90’s browser wars of Netscape vs IE, where whole teams of IT strategists and advisors would painstakingly determine which approach was going to serve the organisation best.
But taken in context of Google’s ongoing mission, it’s something really rather different. Here’s a little of what Google say about…
‘All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.’
Along with Android, Google is changing the game of personal computing by moving the user’s first point of information access and organisation away from the user interface of the computer or phone and toward the Internet access platform – ‘the browser’.
If most of the useful information I want is on the Internet, it’s the Internet information access service I’m going to want to be really useful more than the desktop or phone device interface itself. Of course, the economic and business model that underpins Chrome is bang in Google’s sweet spot. And to my mind this is another indication that the 3 trends of 21st century business architecture seem to be holding true.
A positive move for the global socio-technical environment and an intriguing development for the industry.
Posted by Carl Bate on September 2, 2008 | 
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Comments
# on September 2, 2008 12:29 PM, Rick Mans said:
Is it really a positive move for teh industry or will we just end up with one big player who 'owns' the Internet.
Please read my thoughts about Google and Chrome on our technology blog: http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog/2008/09/world_domination_is_near.php
# on September 2, 2008 12:45 PM, Carl Bate said:
Hi Rick
In my view it's a positive move for us - i.e. people who use the internet everyday. I think it will be fascinating to see where the market goes - some folks believe there are left of field scale challenges to Google's economic model so world domination isn't perhaps as assured as it might appear.
I think it's important to have the debate, and I'm all for sharing both the positive and the negative perspectives around!
# on September 2, 2008 7:53 PM, andy mulholland said:
Thanks for getting this post out quickly Carl
Can't resist just adding a few quick points as by pure coincidence the post i made yesterday; 'wii, second life and may be iphone is all coming together'actually ended by asking the question if the browser as we know it today is really right for what we want/need it to be.
Well Google manage to make their views on the challenges that need to be addressed pretty clear in their 'comic strip' presentation that they mailed around. If you havent seen it then its at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/#
Alternatively if you want a good synopsis of what Chrome is really about in a more conventional technology descritpion then try http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.html
regards Andy
# on September 2, 2008 9:41 PM, David Gerard said:
"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. "That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on this statement." - http://notnews.today.com/?p=57
# on September 2, 2008 9:53 PM, Ron Tolido said:
@Andy: and a nice case of synchronicity indeed, as I just added a complete blog item which also mentioned the
'comic strip'. Looks like Chrome really hit the IT market...
# on September 2, 2008 11:56 PM, Niraj J said:
Could'nt help notice that all open source products from google (GWT , Android and now Chrome) are client facing and fuel for making Cloud Computing a reality.As Nick Carr pointed out that the weakest link in the Cloud is the browser and taking it to the next level of applications only brings them closer to make Google as THE platform for SaaS development.
Google has not open sourced any of its server side technologies like BigTable, MapReduce etc. and I dont think they would open source them unless they become commodities (with Hadoop etc) and there is cost leverage by open sourcing them
# on September 3, 2008 10:36 AM, Carl Bate said:
David - great link - thx for the best chuckle of the day!
Niraj - agree this adds a turbo boost to the already fast growing SaaS market.
# on September 3, 2008 6:34 PM, media junkie said:
i'm willing to try it out just to see if it works more efficiently than FireFox... if it's faster than Firefox and isn't IE, then i'll use it
# on September 5, 2008 6:32 PM, Milé Buurmeijer said:
Nothing beats the real thing. So I went installing it and started it... it failed to initialize... on my company Vista laptop. I know it is beta, but most Google beta stuff is beyond the ordinary beta quality levels. Or should I consider the Vista laptop rollout as beta.
I haven't done browser testing for long time and I hesite testing something so fundamental of todays computing (maybe I should not perform these things on my work laptop). Yep it worked on my xp home pc. It was even completly in Dutch inlcuding the how-to movies. OK I will test it for a while...
Once again they have found another way to reuse their huge infrastructure and information asset: in testing the products against the cached pages and using all the searches we perform in suggesting the search terms. Another win-win.