Googling the Big Picture

by Alex Rieneck

Google’s new browser has gotten a lot of ink over the last couple of days, and with good reason, as a lot of sites have pointed out “Chrome” is a classy kind of a name for a piece of software, and “Tabs” are rather hot things, and the software is free, which is always good, and “Chrome” protects the user against malware and other things that are commonly accepted as being bad. Oddly enough though most writers seem to have gone to town on the coolness of “Chrome” and in concentrating on the surface, rather missed the whole damn point.

The thing is that Google is a business and does not do things because they are “cool”. They do things to make a profit and to gain market position. “Chrome” is a product. As a product “Chrome” means something. Well, several things.

Firstly, “Chrome” means that Google is finally making its big move on Microsoft. “Chrome” is directly positioned to knock Microsoft’s “Internet Explorer” off the perch as the worlds top browser and at the same time to shoulder its way into the market segment owned by Firefox, Safari and the other “niche” browsers. While it is obvious that “Chrome” is directed at “Internet Explorer” it is undeniable that it will, due to the way the market works, initially do far more damage to the market shares of the niche browsers rather that to “Internet Explorer”. After all, people who are still using “Internet Explorer” in 2008 are either supremely unadventurous, mentally benighted or (as is far more common) locked into using “Explorer” by the usage policies of their place of work. The IT departments of the world are guaranteed to be slower to uptake “Chrome” than the users of say, “Firefox” therefore it is pretty obvious that “Firefox” and the other niche browsers will hemorrhage users before any noticeable damage is done to the Microsoft user base. This is unsurprising, the Internet IS the playing field and the playing field and isn’t level and Google is a business, not a charity. Firefox can look forward to becoming more of a niche browser than it was. Starting the day before yesterday.

Secondly, “Chrome” like nothing Google has done before it, shows the direction that Google thinks that the market is headed in and the ways in which Google plans to capitalise on these market developments. Firstly, Google thinks that “Web 2.0” has arrived and will gather steam, with the concept of the HTML webpage continuing to be replaced by the kind of mess of scripts and sundry programming that will make the average HTML homepage look like writing on a toilet wall. Each of these new breed of webpages will have so much latitude in programming that the “Chrome” browser will lock them as far away from the machine’s operating system as it is possible to get. Each browser “tab” in essence becomes a small virtual operating system in its own right. Tabs can crash, in extreme conditions (I bet) the Chrome browser can crash, but the base operating system (in this case Windows) cannot be affected. Theoretically anyway, at this stage.

This attitude to the concept “browser” means a few things. Obviously Google wants and expects the world of Javascript and the other scripting languages to grow exponentially from this point on. Programmers and sites will have great latitude with what they can do within the bounds of “Chrome”, much more latitude than they can expect with a normal browser, but the damage they can do will be limited and because the user will be insulated from the worst that programmers can do the overall playing field will (theoretically anyway) provide more in the way of possibilities. The user can far expect more in the way of the “bells and whistles” of the net, far more interactive as opposed to passive content. Games. Pages which go “boing”. Video. Applications.

The days when a web page was coded by someone with a handbook of HTML terms and a copy of “Notepad” are gone. The webpage is dead. The web has become a corporate world where sites are big business, where everyone has a business model and there is simply no longer any place for the small home-made sites of “normal” people. You don’t believe me? Make a site. Get it hosted. Take on the big boys. Those days are past. FaceBook and MySpace have owned that market and “Chrome” is the browser for this re-invented world of the Internet as an entertainment-delivery mechanism. Chrome is purpose designed to hold open multiple heavy-duty, script-heavy, corporate sites at the one time, without crashing and, more importantly without letting some MySpace creep break your computer, because this is the world as Google sees it. Big sites. Big advertising. Complete user tracking by the sites in question, if they pay. Unimaginable amounts of quality data concerning the herd behaviour of the human animal. Google wants to own the advertising motherload from idea to eyeball. To put it in the kind of language more understandable to mere mortals, if the world is a monopoly board Google wants the square called “Internet” to have a mile high stack of little red hotels on it and Google wants to own all of them.

Back to “Chrome”. If each little browser tab “website” contains a set of active processes that to the layman, “do stuff” there is no reason why each tab should not be treated as purely what it is, simply an active process. In other words, a program. Each tab can be, and in Google’s vision, will be, a word processor, a spreadsheet, a whatever. In Google’s vision the online web-based word processor will be paid for by either content related advertising or by simple subscription. You get no prize for guessing whose Word processor will be the most popular, whose spreadsheet will be adopted by business and whose nifty named web browser will be the glue that holds it all together. In the early days, I would hazard a guess, the Word processor might well be emblazoned with the word “Microsoft” but, after a few years and after a few mergers the name could be shortened back to “Word”.

In this brave future as envisaged by Google, the Internet will be an infinite number of interactive television stations and Google will search and rate and watch all of them and will of course micro-charge for each individual service. In this perfect world, Google will BE the Internet, and “Chrome” will be the program that delivers it.

As the man says, there is more. With the growth of online storage, such as Apple’s MobileMe and of course Google’s GSpace, within a decade or so the consumer hard drive will become a thing of the past. After all, when sites like Flickr and FaceBook and the like are taken into account who does not already use online storage? If the stuff is stored online, it will be backed up, for you. It will be as safe as corporate data storage can make it. Who needs a big hard drive then? Only the paranoid, the crooked and the old school will care and they as groups will quickly die out, after all Steve and Bill themselves are already getting on in years, and we are talking about the future here. The home hard-drive will become obsolete and with it will go the need for backup software, virus checkers and in short order, the operating system that is needed to support such obsolete concepts. All that will remain will be a later version of a thing that once used to be called a web browser called “Chrome” in a nice appliance that is easy to use. But of course, by then it won’t be called “The Web” anymore either, it will be called something like “Google” and no-one will have any idea where it begins, or ends.

Well, that’s Google’s plan, anyway and the thing is, I think it will work.

© Alex Rieneck
04 September 2008