September 2, 2008

Google finally played out the first step of its display platform strategy by introducing Chrome to the world. I like the name, in the sense that Google clearly sees it as a much needed patina of presentation to the vast amount of content it has accumulated.

This is emphatic proof that Mozilla’s FireFox was simply a drug distribution network for Google’s search engine vs. being the eventual “preferred platform” for web content. I don’t think Google could ever trust Mozilla to be a reliable fountain of innovation. One has to wonder if Mozilla Lab projects like Ubiquity etc. were attempts at winning Google’s trust.

In hindsight, the Mozilla relationship is simply a business transaction - it should be no surprise to anybody who has seen Google’s fiercely independent infrastructure platform evolve. Whatever they have liked about FireFox, they are incorporating into Chrome, along with a multi-threaded JavaScript engine from the V8 boys and Apple’s WebKit. I wonder how the V8 JS engine compares with TraceMonkey, which is insanely quick.

All in all, I find this move fascinating. I am a big advocate on content equity and the inherent user loyalty one builds by fostering it. Google is the King when it comes to content discovery, analysis & delivery. They may not be the biggest single producer of content on the web, but that’s not the goal. The goal is for them to being the “exchange” on which all content based transactions flow.

What Google has realized, is that their vanilla search engine page and current browser technologies are rapidly becoming inadequate delivery channels for the vast amount of content it needs to deliver to its user base. The simple reality is that the browser promotes a fragmented environment for the GUser. They are constantly hopping around on different properties but experiencing the same Google Content Firehose. Google wants to correct that with Chrome.

What they want to do with Chrome is supercharge the client and take advantage of the multi-core wave hitting consumer machines. Today the average number of cores probably stands @ 1.4-1.6… in a year we are likely to see it hit 2… in 3 years it is likely to hit 4 and by the 5th, 8. I am included new and existing machines as part of the averaging and this is just a rapid mental extrapolation. So please Math divas, keep yer abacus wrapped in parchment.

Chrome is a VERY clear indicator to me that Google has had promising results from its voice, video & image recognition algorithms. There’s a whole bunch of engineers probably demonstrating crazy prototypes to Miss Mayer and showing her how awesome this experience can be IF FireFox or IE could take advantage of desktop horsepower available on most broadband machines.

Chrome, with its one-process-per-Tab, multi-threaded engine clearly allows for some interesting use-cases when it comes to background threads crunching video/audio/image submissions on the client to decipher & autotag prior to upload for example. The same goes for use-cases where rich UIs with heavy 3-D needs to run in the browser.

They are probably working to go away from the approach PicLens had to take where they build IE/FF plug-ins with C/C++/OpenGL to give users an immersive experience. Why should a developer have to do that? Why not push the limits inside the browser itself. For those who have built prototypes with VRML2.0 (moi), we all know the promise is there, but there is much work to be done.

In case it isn’t obvious, I love this play from Google. For the first time, the company has made it very clear to Microsoft & others that it is going to compete as a technology company as well as a new media force. Google has embarked on two clear fronts here: Technology & Media.

And while the media war is pretty much won with Yahoo a pawn, Microsoft a minnow and others just a footnote - the Technology war is far from over with Microsoft remaining a force. No matter what Google does with the browser, the OS it will likely run on will be Microsoft. A majority of the web traffic to Google’s content properties comes from IE. So this is far from over.

Google can attain a strong position here with Chrome if they leverage their considerable content equity & mindshare to offers users a superb experience on the web. As good as it is now, it can be way better. I look forward to a world were the topic of discussion isn’t retarded bandwidth caps by Comcast but truly immersive worlds delivered inside the browser. Making the browser the OS. I don’t really care if MS or Google or Intel or Cisco or IBM delivers that to me - I just want it in the next decade.

I’ve waited since 2000, for this. Back then in my honors thesis @ Pace University I predicted a world that went back to the cloud. A world where bandwidth, pervasive devices & rich content offered the user community a superior experience to the boxed-in world of the standalone OS.

It’s about bloody time - bring it on Chrome. Make it real, comic books and all.

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