Cringley thinks Chrome is all about the danger of Microsoft making Ad-blocking in IE sufficiently good to hurt Google.
Haque meanwhile is wearing his rose-coloured Google glasses.
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6 comments:
Ad Haque - yeah - it is a bit disturbing to realise how much both hallmarks of his new strategy approach Google and Apple use secrecy.
"rose-coloured Google glasses" made me laugh. But I'm sure we agree that Haque's broader concern for commerce with morality is not trivial. The discussion I like best there is about this more fundamental issue.
Changing browsers is a real pain in the neck, so I'm not sure what's got me playing around with Chrome. I do think the fact that there's nothing so far that makes me say it's impossible is significant. Still there are some bugs, some of which are obviously being fixed; for example as I type in this form, the font size is no longer 6pt although the comments displayed still are.
As far as Cringely saying: "Chrome is a reference design that Google knows will work brilliantly with all Google Apps." That's not true now, I hope it will be sooner or later.
Yeah, John. I don't want to sound too cynical on Haque. I think he's brilliant in a lot of ways. I certainly don't want to trip up his crusade for "goodness". (Of either the Categorical or Hypothetical Imperative kinds)
My big issue with him is the slightly "happy-face" assumption at the heart of his writing : that, ultimately, enlightened self-interest of companies (ie. those strategies which have given Google world-domination) are by definition going to line up with the moral good.
Basically this issue.
In practice, looking for ways to "Chrome" other industries is a genius way to stimulate creative thinking. His "Reinvent Detroit" discussion was wonderful.
But he also underestimates why other industries don't happen to have incentives aligned towards growing the public sphere in the way they are with Google.
And he's also downplaying the fact that the browser (backed by Google) *is* in a zero-sum game against the desktop operating systems like Windows and MacOS as a place to host applications.
Today, right now, people are buying Asus-style netpads etc. with Linux + Firefox because they are an acceptable substitute for a cheap Windows PC for people who do most stuff in the browser. And those are sales that Microsoft is losing. So it's no entirely true that the rising tide is lifting all boats. And Google is not spitting out random acts of kindness. It's playing a more targeted game, growing platforms that certainly benefit a wider community, but are also platforms on which its main rivals (Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Apple) are weak and are likely to be most at risk from upstarts.
My hypothesis for the existence of "Chrome" the product is boiling down now to a mixture of defensive, aggressive and "because they can".
Cringely's point that a dominant IE might find a way to block Google's Ads. is well made but we should look at what else it might block. The nub is Gears.
Gears is one of Google's full-on attacks against Windows, MacOS (and Flash, Java and Silverlight).
Not only, as Scribe pointed out, does Google need to make the browser an industrial strength operating-system Gears container, Google may also have (plausible) worries that IE will find ways to screw-up (or run badly) Gears apps. when compared to Silverlight.
Finally, the "because they can" is down to Google's decentralized R&D. Maybe the project wouldn't have been justified had Google been a more traditionally centralized company with top-down decision making about what projects to develop at what cost / benefit. But Chrome found enough grass-roots support to become viable after which it became a comparatively cheap shot across M$, Apple, Adobe and even Mozilla's bows.
I share your caution about Haque presuming that the enlightened self-interests of companies will align with moral good. As an American in the middle of a political season his use of good and evil makes me cringe.
Thanks for taking the time to lay out Google's targeted game. Chrome as a full-on attack on operating systems strikes me as a bit ho-hum. If I understand what you've written before right, that the OS has been commoditized so that's not where the real platform war is anymore. The new platform war is in the cloud.
The polarity of good and evil is an easy habit to fall into, reality is generally more complex.
You've got ideas about how MS can excel eg. making their products modular and selling software as a service without going the world domination route.
I'm not a sophisticated computer user--I use a cast-off XP machine. But even I have come to expect that MS will proceed by trying to break things. A cheap shot across the bow doesn't make Google good. But with MS's penchant for aggressively protecting its OS market against the trend toward widget containers, Google's cheap shot across the bow seems a good thing.
John, yeah I certainly agree that Chrome is a great thing.
I just don't think it quite illustrates a story as simplistic as Haque would have us believe ... which is something like "creating more open, free-er markets, is the way to create more wealth for yourself and everyone else".
I have nothing against using Good and Evil as convenient short-hands, just as long as we don't believe that "good" and "evil" in Haque's sense == the Good and Evil as we understand it.
In one sense, Haque is working off the same underlying intuitions that drive right-libertarian market fundamentalists. Maybe following the path opened by Eric Raymond in "The Cathedral and Bazaar" which sought to align the benefits that arose from the free-software movement with a more general free-market libertarianism.
There's an alternative story to be told, to Raymond's ... one which recognises that people had to be "political" ... to *choose* to do the right thing, for political and moral reasons, and not merely to follow their own self-aggrandizement in a competitive market, in order to make the great free-software movement happen.
In a similar way, one could argue that to get "good" done (whether creating a public good like a commons or some other act of virtue), you need to choose to be good not merely to hope that it falls out of being clever in your attempt to get rich.
It's not that Haque isn't right in the case of Google Chrome ... or that good can't or doesn't co-exist with self-interest. It clearly can and likely does in this case. It's not that I want to dissuade people from the pro-social entrepreneurial path.
But if you claim that the distinction doesn't *exist*, that the good and smart self-interest are one and the same, then you've entered a far more dubious territory.
Agree that the new platform war is in the cloud, but there are still some residual things which can be done on the desktop and not in the cloud *yet* because the browser as front-end to the cloud is not as capable as the full desktop. Until that changes, although I personally think the specific flavour of desktop doesn't really matter, there's still a tension between desktop and cloud apps.
And with the RIA engines (Flash, Silverlight, Java Virtual Machines) somewhere between the two, things are still pretty complex.
I'm still guessing wildly in the dark about all this stuff, but Gears still looks to me to be key ... it's a way for Google to "own" (yes, despite all the negative connotations we have for that word here in Edgeland, that's what's going on here) a chunk of the client-side even in a cloud-oriented future.
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