Today Google announced that they are launching an operating system called Chrome OS. This is a strategically very smart move.
Google makes money off the web, their primary source of revenue is adsense which brings in billions of dollars a year. They are quickly diversifying their offerings with google apps, gmail, analytics and a host of other applications. All of them webbased. They are an Internet company by heart: This is where their soul lies, and this is what they do best. Their back-end technology is unsurpassed and their brand is phenomenal. Their future and financial success depends on the Internet. Or more precisely it depends on having as many people and corporations as possible moving most of their information and work online. Preferably to one of Google’s offerings.
There are two gatekeeper products between the user and Googles products: The browser and the OS. A user needs an OS and a browser to reach Google’s products, and whoever controls these can put up roadblocks between the user and Google. I’m talking about Microsoft here of course. And since many of their products compete with Google, Office being the prime example, they have have all the incentive in the world to make the users way through the OS and browser as hard a s possible before they can reach Googles products. It’s a good strategic decision, Office is a major cash cow and accounts for a large part of Microsofts revenue. It would be stupid to make it easier to use a competitors products if you can do something about it. Which Microsoft can because they are the gatekeepers.
Google knows this, and are trying hard to change the status quo. That’s why they have long supported the Mozilla foundation who make the Firefox browser. It’s also why they launched their own browser last year. Microsofts Internet explorer has always been buggy, and not quite up to date. The newest technology often isn’t available in explorer. This isn’t because Microsoft engineers are stupid, it’s because Microsoft management is good at strategy. They want people to use the Internet for browsing news and finding information, not to start undermining the goldmine that is office. And you need a state of the art browser to use the heavy javascript that makes online productivity apps possible. When Google launched a browser it was a jab at the gatekeepers. It was much faster and more responsive than Explorer, and the javascript engine blew them out of the water. This put Microsoft in a strategically bad position, they didn’t want to make the browser so good that online apps could eat away at their core business, but if they didn’t follow suit they would start losing marketshare quickly. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Note that Google’s browser doesn’t need to have a large marketshare, indeed that’s not the goal. The goal is to show the world what can be done in a browser, and thereby forcing Microsoft to innovate. And it worked: The newer versions of explorer are faster and have particularly gotten better at executing javascript, the backbone of online apps. Google won the browser war, with the help of Mozilla. The important point here is that Google doesn’t care what browser you use. They don’t make money on browsers, they make money on online offerings and apps so all they care about is that your browser is fast and supports the newest technologies.
Now they are launching an operating system, and attacking the last gatekeeper technology between the enduser and their offerings. Strategically the situation is exactly the same as the browser war, Google doesn’t care if you use their OS. All they care about is that you can get to their products quickly, and that you start moving your data onto the web instead of keeping it on your own harddrive. And the way to do this is to launch an operating system that shows how easy it is to use the Internet for almost anything. That’s why they have been boasting about ridiculously low startup times. Turn on your computer and 10 seconds later you’ll be at google.com. And they’ll use the OS to show how little you actually need to have on your computer, how few programs you need installed, and how much easier it is if you find your information with Google, use Google docs for your work, share your family pictures with picassa, and check your website stats with Google analytics.
Microsoft will have to adapt, and follow along. If they want to keep their marketshare that is. Of course they’ll be destroying their core business in the process. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
This one will be hard for Microsoft to counter.
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Hitchhiker says: