Burning Chrome

Google made the announcement a very interesting few weeks. First, the Google Docs Viewer support for a stack of new document types, including Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop and PostScript. Second, the ability of the new Chrome to run background applications that run seamlessly and invisibly behind the browser. Third, they released Google Cloud Connect, which lets users sync Windows Office documents to Google Docs. They also announced the Android 3.0 SDK - but despite the ongoing tablet hysteria, in the long term, the first three are much more important.

Little by little, iteration by iteration, the Chrome browser quietly morphing into a fully multitasking operating system in itself. Oh, sure, technically it's actually running on another OS, but you do not have the need to start anything. View and edit documents in Google Docs, watch and listen to video and audio HTML5, communicate via Gmail and Google Voice Plugin, use Google Docs as a file system - and the line between "Chrome OS" and "Chrome OS on each other" suddenly grew very smooth.

Google seems to be a long-term strategy to replace Microsoft by first building the best browser, then making it easy to move your files to Google Docs ... and finally, slowly but surely, making Windows and Office are irrelevant. Obviously nobody is going to leave Microsoft products wholesale near future, but as cloud computing grows more ubiquitous, Google continues iterates feature after feature, and people grow accustomed to working in the browser, and then one day, maybe a few years from now , a whole lot of people - and businesses - will start thinking to themselves "Hey, we have not really needed Windows or Office on the moon. Why do we even have them at all?"

The "network computer" dumb-terminal approach has failed many times before ... but so did Six Degrees, Tribe.net, Friendster, and (eventually) MySpace, Facebook before coming. The original iMac was criticized for not having to drive critics, floppy festive sounds stupid now. We may look back at the first Chrome OS notebook in much the same way. Of course, Chrome can not really compete with Windows to always-on broadband internet access achieved the same level of reliability and ubiquitous as electricity itself, but it was only a matter of time. In the early days of electricity, each plant has its own power plant, and the manager would have been shocked by the idea of ​​outsourcing the engine is important - but they were soon replaced by the installation of efficient power grid today. Computing is the new electric power, and cloud computing is a new network.

Unlike most companies, when I say "cloud", they mean it. Compare Amazon's cloud-computing services to Google. With the first, you basically call and configure one or more servers with the OS and specifications of your choice, but with Google App Engine, you do not know anything about the hardware or the operating system, because it is no longer important. It just runs the code you provided, and you do not care how much. Similarly, Chrome was built for a future in which the Internet, wireless ambient ubiquitous connect everything from clothes to computers to cars (which explains how they themselves fit into the strategy driving them) and do not care much what OS the device is given is running.

I've criticized Google very hard lately, but credit where it's due: they still think bigger and farther than anyone else. The problem is that all the brilliant strategies based on their continued dominance of the search space, users are always just a fun jump ship to an alternative, and they have taken their eye off the ball lately. But at least they've finally started to crack down on spam the search. This is the beginning. Maybe they do not grow too bureaucratic and sclerotic to make the future happen Chrome after all.