When Microsoft and Yahoo! failed in their spring dinosaur merger dance, who knew Google was snickering in the background knowingly waiting to launch its own attack on the vaunted Microsoft Internet Explorer browser? Remember those long summer days filled with US and EU antitrust trials? Those cases of mind-numbing minutiae where judge after judge ordered and MS insisted they could not unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows?
Remember how cute it was when they thumbed their noses at courts everywhere in that grumpy, “We are Microsoft, fear us! way of theirs? To them it was apocalyptic, end of world, no worse, end of Microsoft as we know it, stuff… Well OK, it was pretty damned inconvenient…
Now, according to Google, more web searches happen from iPhones and other mobile devices than from any other Web platform. Bill and Steve’s excellent adventure is about to be trumped by Sergei and Eric’s Chrome.
And, Google’s Chrome will be totally open source to encourage developers to create more synchronised products. They’ve learned that through Open Source you get a better and continually improving product, something Microsoft has a long way to go to find.
Ironically Chrome, inspired by Apple and Mozilla, could end up hurting those two platforms more than Microsoft. The theory is if folks have not shifted to Firefox, why would they move to an unknown new player whereas those already on the other platforms already switched once and many have an almost militant anti-IE or MS ethos.
It will be fun to imagine the Google ethos of “do no harm” in a world they dominate. Imagine all of the power of Google – Search, Maps, Earth, AdSense, AdWords, YouTube and on and on… running on its own Web browser?
Google want to shift the ballgame away from desktops to the Web way and they have the muscle, money and chutzpah to do it. Of course not every Google application turns to gold, (see underperforming: Froogle, Google Checkout and the social network Orkut) but what an interesting start for them. Especially since Microsoft has always seen them as their biggest threat to the future of computing.
Still, it looks like Bill was right to be worried.
Who’s got next?
