Google’s browser strategy
While they keep our eyes busy by wiggling their fingers around a “cloud computing” strategy, the Google guys are up to something else: they want to seize the real killer app, which is the freeware browser/email combination.
Most people don’t like to look at it this way, but the major uses people have for the internet all date back to 1980s uses:
- News — from reading Prodigy and AOL to massive aggregators like Digg and Slashdot.
- Address book — what do most people really use social networking for? Connecting to real life friends so if that Yahoo! email address expires, they can still reach them.
- Documentation — Google is like a giant library if you know where to look. Who keeps track of the links? Del.icio.us, or maybe your browser.
People aren’t going to go with cloud computing, which has only one real value: if paired with virtual machines, it gives companies the ability to dynamically scale their web presence. If your hits suddenly quintuple, and you’re running a virtual machine that’s distributed over a cluster, you can increase its resources and you’ll handle the load — a big advantage over having one machine, one website.
But do you really want to edit your documents on a web page? Especially after you’ve shelled out for a high-powered machine, this is unlikely. What’s more likely is that you’ll get a combination offsite backup and application installation solution, kind of like Iron Mountain or Mozy.com crossed with Apple’s app store. (I mention this in an earlier post as something Microsoft should do.)
All of these indicators, however, come back to one idea: that the browser is here to stay. To their credit, the Microsoft guys figured this out, but their browser team was not agile enough — probably thanks to layers of middle management — to make a competitive product on all fronts, and those weaknesses were brilliantly exploited by hackers and ploddingly exploited by Mozilla.org.
Now Firefox has a huge chunk of browser market share, with probably more to come with the excellent 3.5, which may be the fastest, most stable and most well-designed interface yet. Did I mention that 85% or more of the Mozilla’s teams funding came from Google? That is kind of interesting, since Google has since released their own browser, Chrome.
It’s part of a two-stage strategy. The first was to weaken Microsoft through an indirect attack, using Mozilla which is open source and freeware and non-profit and so “good” to most people, and the second stage is now coming true: make Chrome work best with the Google applications they’re hoping to convince us to use.

As you can see above, they’ve started that move already. Google apps work best with Google chrome. But you’re not being forced to use it. It will be your choice, whether you want these added and optional features or not.
Much as Google’s strategy is to use a search engine to sell advertising, their strategy here is to get you to use their apps so they get better tracking data. The big weakness of search is that most searchers are not the consumers advertisers want; the solution is to get people using applications and site features and so getting a chance to offer them customized advertising, and offering coupons and the like to those who are the ideal customers.