Google Shines with Chrome

John Furrier was way out in front of the Google Chrome story. What’s Chrome you ask? Google will announce tomorrow they are coming out with a new browser called “Chrome”. The feature list looks a lot like IE7 and IE8 with a sprinkling of Firefox. And the kicker, supposedly it will be 100% open source.

This is HUGE! And the strategy is only thinly veiled. Google is planning an end-around on the OS market. Between Google Apps, Gears and new Chrome they are attempting to make the OS irrelevant. Much the way VMWare ESXi, or Microsoft Server Core, boots to a minimal operation set as a foundation Google can bootstrap through linux. The vision is booting to a foundation OS that launches Chrome as a gateway to the Google ecosystem and takes Microsoft out of the game.

It’s a bold strategy and I’m not sure it’s realistic in the enterprise market but it could change the game for the larger (in raw numbers) consumer market. Emerging markets like China and India are huge opportunities. It’s the 80s land grab all over again. Except this time, instead of Microsoft and Apple it’s Microsoft and Google. Microsoft annihilated Apple in the 80s and 90s but Google may prove a more resilient competitor this time around. However, Google’s strategy begs for antitrust inspection. The analysis I’ve seen is that they hope to avoid this by keeping the project open source and furthering the ecosystem through open contribution. I don’t know enough about antitrust law to form an opinion but it seems a bit flimsy.

Phillip Lenssen posted the first story I’ve seen on the topic and it’s full of detail. More than one might expect from an as-yet-unannounced product. I think he’s been tracking this one for awhile. He also says to keep an eye out at http://www.google.com/chrome. I’d imagine this will end up at http://chrome.google.com sooner or later. Phillip pulled out the feature list in detail on his blog.

My personal feeling is Google will get bit by the 1.0 bug. For those unfamiliar it’s any company’s seeming inability to put out a good 1.0 product in their rush to go to market. Google’s made a interesting and bold strategic move but only Google fanboys (Ganboys?) would take it seriously at this point. In 3-5 years it might be a completely different situation. Either way, the pressure is on MSFT from a lot of different angles. Competition is good and Microsoft has been “the best” for a long time. I believe this competition will bring out the best in a lot of vendors and overall everyone will benefit from the accelerated innovation.