Google unveils web-based OS

A prod­uct long rumored and whose very exis­tence was long denied by Google itself finally launched: the Google browser, aka. Google Chrome. There are a num­ber of things that are good and a few that leaves one scratch­ing his head but ulti­mately, it is very clear that Google is work­ing very hard to ensure that it can keep tight con­trol of the ground its gained and fend off poten­tial threats by the likes of Microsoft.

Strate­gic Position

Google lives on the web. Most of its appli­ca­tion need a web layer in order to oper­ate and, if it were to find itself in a posi­tion where the access to their appli­ca­tion where to be com­pro­mised through the equiv­a­lent of a strate­gic man in the mid­dle type of attack, their busi­ness would die off. So, if Microsoft, which cur­rently still con­trols around 70 per­cent of the web browser mar­ket, were to decided to change their code to impact how Google appli­ca­tions func­tion, Google would be in deep deep trouble.

Because Google real­izes that the browser is sort of their achilles heel, they had to make a play into that space. The first thing they did was help the cre­ation of an alter­nate offer­ings, by giv­ing large sub­si­dies to Microsoft com­peti­tors like Apple and the Mozilla foun­da­tion, largely dolled out as rev­enue for traf­fic gen­er­a­tion through the search box. See, one of the thing not too many con­sumers are told about is that the search box in Safari or in Fire­fox are actu­ally paid place­ments: Every time a user uses that box to per­form a search, a lit­tle bit of rev­enue goes back to the browser cre­ator. So that’s great because it allows those alter­na­tive browsers to develop and, as long as Google is people’s pre­ferred choice any­ways, no one is complaining.

Of course, there are cer­tain issues with the arrange­ment: a lot of the peo­ple who have installed Safari or Fire­fox don’t like online ads and some devel­op­ers were happy to pro­vide tools allow­ing those users to remove ads from web pages. Google wasn’t too thrilled about that but it found the issue mostly OK as long as the arrange­ment didn’t hurt its adver­tis­ing cash cow too much.

But over time, this model cre­ated a prob­lem. The fea­ture was tested by con­sumers who, hav­ing seen too much of their screen real estate pol­luted by ever larger ads, liked what they saw. And, as ads became smarter and started to tar­get users indi­vid­u­ally, it spooked con­sumers. Being able to block cer­tain ads became a prod­uct dif­fer­en­tia­tor and started to cause some prob­lems to Microsoft.

So, with IE8, Microsoft is start­ing to claim that it will help users and one of the trial baloons it has been float­ing is that the user may have more con­trol over what ads they can see and pos­si­bly may be able to block some ads.

For Google, that’s not too happy a devel­op­ment: the idea of being able to pro­vide free prod­ucts is based on the fact that Google is really and adver­tis­ing com­pany with a side busi­ness in search. And if the adver­tis­ing is blocked, then Google’s whole busi­ness model falls apart.

So now, Google needs to regain some level of con­trol. For many years, it’s been going after bits and pieces of the Microsoft empire: a lit­tle bit of the office suite over here (Google Apps), a lit­tle bit of the enter­prise space this way (Google Appli­ances), a lit­tle extra screen real estate (Google Wid­gets), an alter­nate appli­ca­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work (Google Pack)… but the premise behind most of their offer­ings was that life was now in the “net­work cloud” (basi­cally recall­ing Scott McNealy’s old “The Net­work is the Com­puter” con­cept with 2.0 flavor).

With Chrome, Google is now try­ing to bypass most of Win­dows. There’s still a few things that Win­dows will be allowed to do for now (con­nect­ing to the Inter­net, man­ag­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion layer) but it seems that this is the far­thest Google has gone into address­ing Microsoft head on. In the mid-1990s, Marc Andreesen, then at Netscape, said he wanted to rel­e­gate Win­dows to being just a set of basic libraries and, with this offer­ing,  Google is try­ing very hard to do so though I am sure you’ll never hear them say so.

Will it work? I don’t know. At first glance, I’d say that their chal­lenge will be to get the soft­ware installed on a lot of machine. For all their past efforts, it looks like it may take a while. Once they have got­ten Google Chrome installed, the next thing will be to move up to a default set­ting. That will be another challenge.

What I sus­pect is that the com­pany will soon offer a cus­tomiz­able ver­sion to cable and phone com­pa­nies to ensure that they choose Chrome over Inter­net Explorer. And one thing I’m pretty sure about is that what­ever hap­pens, Google will ensure that ad block­ing soft­ware will not work on Chrome.

Mem­ory Man­age­ment: Mar­ket­ing or Truth?

One of the things that leaves me scratch­ing my head is whether the mem­ory man­age­ment Google claims as an impor­tant piece of its offer­ing is actu­ally based more on mar­ket­ing mes­sages than real­ity. Buried in the developer’s menu is an item that sup­pos­edly offers a view into the mem­ory and CPU usage of Google’s new browser. Yes, the browser feels fast so it’s clear that there are a num­ber of improve­ments there but what is that cost­ing in terms of mem­ory. Here’s what the browser reports:

What you’re see­ing here is the browser run­ning two plain HTML pages and an instance of a richer web-based appli­ca­tion (Google Reader, which, accord­ing to this, accounts for 40Mb of mem­ory space used). Where I get a lit­tle puz­zled is when I looked at what Microsoft reported through its task manager:

The same 5 processes appear (but since Win­dows only knows them as run­ning as chrome, it can’t iden­ti­fty which is which but the num­bers are very dif­fer­ent: Chrome reports an aggre­gate mem­ory use of 96,300K while Win­dows reports an aggre­gate mem­ory use of 121,544K or 25,244K more. To be very hon­est, I don’t know which num­ber is cor­rect but, with only 3 tabs open (and the tabs I have on here are the min­i­mum I have open at any time), I don’t find it very reas­sur­ing to see this type of gap appear. Will it get worse as I add more tab? I don’t know but it’s some­thing worth investigating.

Related Terms

More in Analysis,Business,Technology (5 of 5 articles)