Having had to wait until I could get back to Toronto to have access to a machine running Vista, I got my taste of a usable Google Chrome Beta about week later than I should’ve.
It’s rare that I deliberately catalogue the blogospheric consensus prior to using a product in discussion - I don’t want my experience cluttered with the biasing analysis of others (can you tell I’m a usability engineer?). However, in the case of Chrome I found the discussion surrounding it both too interesting and often surreal to with hold.
Tech Crunch IT, in an uncharacteristic bout of skillful prose, proffered what I think is the most interesting analysis on the issue of MSFT & Chrome - juxtaposing it with both the American election and continued devolution of MSNBC.
While I won’t touch the American election material (being a Canadian, I’m yelling into a strong head-wind) I am a consumer of both Microsoft and Google products and feel I can speak to them, their business models and the effects of Chrome on each and others.
Chrome is an excellent core system from which to deploy web applications - the cited purpose of Google. I have a tough time believing that Google intended to deliver a value to customers other than the stated one,. That value is better performing Google apps and more responsive AJAX in general.
I think that Google Chrome should for the time being, be compared to similarly intended products - which isn’t a browser per se, but a heavily modified browser for a specific purpose. That means XULRunner and Internet Explorer’s Window’s in-situ renderer. Google isn’t a browser so much as a DHTML engine with enough UI bolted on to be servicable.
Having said that, the fact that people are mistaking it for a full-fledged browser this early in the game speaks to the quality and robustness of the system.
What I also find difficult to reconcile is the hyperbole surrounding the significance of the product’s release with regards to the corporate landscape. It’s yet another solid product in Google’s gigantic line-up of products.
Some have said this steps outside the core competency of Google. I would argue that it’s actually quite obviously within the scope of Google’s capacity even in the face of more intuitively obvious candidates.
I believe Google’s real strength lies in what it does better than anyone else in the world - understanding how people use the web. They are brilliant at releasing truly disruptive products - they know what functionality is important to users and what isn’t; often better than users know it themselves.
As a long time Galleon user, its nice to see a browser that makes proper use of Webkit’s strengths. Chrome beats Safari as a browser hands down. Still, the best browser anywhere is still Lynx.
Much has been said about what this means for Microsoft - frankly nobody has said anything to convince me it’s a big deal. Microsoft is top dog still, despite people like me predicting its impending demise for nearly two decades. When looking at how to survive in a world with Microsoft one need examine only two companies - IBM and Apple. Which, in a strange way they stand as corporate analogies for fourth-generation warfare.
Microsoft is very comparable to its peer in a different sector - General Electric. However I think Bill Gates has more in common with Jack Welch than Thomas Edison. Welch and Gates, unsurprisingly, are some of history’s greatest CEOs precisely for this feat. Microsoft was the first software company in much the same way GE was the first electric appliance company and they’ve consequently become concommitant with all its effects.
To suggest that Microsoft is going down because Google is growing akin to suggesting Bank of America is going out of business because Investors Group is gaining traction - it just doesn’t make sense and totally misses the point.
Google does not sell a hugely successful game console (and it can’t), Nintendo isn’t going to put Microsoft out of business. Microsoft’s peripherals are some of the best on the market - Logitech isn’t going anywhere but it isn’t a threat. The Zune may not be an iPod killer but it’s doing well enough for Microsoft to keep it going.
Microsoft isn’t about a single product or even a suite. Gates, and his paternal allegiance to Windows and Office, is gone. Microsoft is an everywhere company, just as GE is an everywhere company.
The vulnerabilities of Microsoft and GE can’t come from a corporation or its effects - they can huff and puff but this brick house ain’t going nowhere. The trends that uproot companies like this are generational - huge in scope and beyond the prerogatives of any particular agency.
That said, internal mismanagement can doom Microsoft - just as GE faced hard times. Tim O’Reilly sounds like early 90’s Steve Jobs when he beats up on Microsoft as an out of touch, dessicated and creatively barren company. While the pathos of this argument is entirely sound - the logos is diminutive.
Microsoft understands its customers very well - they are responsible for rafts of research on usability engineering and possess some of the most sophisticated testing apparatus and methodologies available anywhere.
I think what gets lost is the environment in which Microsofts constructs their products. Like NASA or the military - the constraints are bizarrely complex and the product that emerges as a result is often puzzling when that’s not taken into account.
This may sound like a pep talk delivered at a MS project all-hands meeting. Let me be clear, Microsoft can and does produce a mountain of garbage in addition to quality products. The point I’m (attempting to be) making is that Microsoft establishes the cultural paradigm in which we interact with virtually every aspect of the web.
They do, as a firm, what is essentially only possible elsewise via open source - there aren’t any operating systems on par with Windows that were built entirely by one company; let alone the myriad other products Microsoft releases.
Microsoft and GE internalized the concept of long-tail, just as any large production company has ( be it book, movie, video game) - you can’t guarantee a best-seller only influence it, so release as many products to as many people as you can in as intelligent and efficient a method as possible.
This is something Google, Apple, IBM etc. can only do in limited channels and on a limited scale.
It’s also something that in and of itself is valuable - thus I don’t think Microsoft is going anywhere (except into your fridge, tables, mugs, toothpicks, nose hair trimmers, toilet seats…)

