Google has thrown their hat into the ring when it comes to dealing with the Internet Explorer 6 issue, creating an IE plugin that replaces the IE rendering engine with Chrome. I think it’s a pretty brilliant idea, but I’ll be curious to monitor the adoption rate. My guess is that people who are stuck using IE6 for whatever reason won’t install the plugin, given that they haven’t installed any of the other excellent, free options that currently exist. It does let Google take another step away from supporting Internet Explorer, though, since now they can demand that users install the plugin.
My initial reaction upon reading about Google Wave is that while it was catnip for geeks, it had a funny smell about it. I love the idea of code smells and I think the concept is applicable to just about everything. What I didn’t do was sit down and really think out why I was skeptical about it. Fortunately, Anil did. Go read his post.
John Gruber points out that Google Chrome OS is vaporware. There’s no running code, there are no devices, and there aren’t even screen shots. He asks but doesn’t answer why Google made this announcement right now. Steven O’Grady punts on this question in his analysis as well.
This is the burning question for me, why now? In the olden days, we’d call this FUD. There are not many reasons to announce something so early. One is that it was about to leak, and Google wanted to get its story on the record before the media took off with the story. The other is manipulation (FUD). You announce something early to keep people from making decisions without taking your future plans into account.
Right now the market share of the Chrome browser is small. That gives Google little juice in terms of demanding a seat at the table in discussions of future browser development. Google may be trying to raise the prestige of Chrome by letting people know that soon there will be computers available which will support Chrome and only Chrome for browsing. If people presume that Chrome OS will be successful, then suddenly it becomes much more important to take Chrome into account in the overall browser market. So that’s my guess: Google is announcing Chrome OS so that more people will take Chrome seriously.
Google has officially announced its PC operating system, Chrome OS. It’s the Linux kernel, a new windowing system, and the Chrome browser. It’s targeted to run on netbooks. My first thought: Network Computer.
Update: Steven O’Grady has written one of his Q&A pieces on Chrome OS.
Here’s the difference between what a company like Google can do and what most can do. Google Wave was the big news yesterday, but it’s not exactly a new effort. It’s been in the works since 2007:
Lars had already moved to Sydney, and made the case that Wave could best be created there, where the team could operate as a kind of independent startup. Jens moved over, and they built the first prototype over nine months with a team of five, during 2007. Since then, the team has grown to about 100.
Not many companies can afford to dedicate 100 highly paid people to what is essentially a completely speculative effort. Google has almost certainly invested more resources in Wave than Twitter has utilized over its life, and Twitter has millions of current users.
It’ll be interesting to see how Wave does once the demos are over and real people start using it. Google Wave’s evolution clearly runs counter to the “release early and often” culture that pervades Web development these days and I’ll be interested to see whether it works out well.
How committed is Google to driving Chrome adoption? They’re running TV ads to get people to try it out. Farhad Manjoo speculates on why people aren’t adopting Chrome, but not so much on why Google really wants them to adopt it. I don’t think anyone has really explained what Google hopes to gain by driving adoption of its own browser — and clearly, given the TV ads, they are very committed to this project.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s far too early to write off Chrome. Google needs to worry about winning over the alpha geeks. If they can do that, larger adoption is almost certain a few years down the road.
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