In 1983, in an episode of the cult series “The All-Risk Agency”, George Peppard, alias Hannibal, said to Mr T. alias Barracuda: “an old adage tells us that the best offense is a good defense”. To which Mr T. replies: “You don’t have the right formula, dear friend. A good offense is the best defence.” And they gave battle to pythons or other serpents.
Last Tuesday, Google “carelessly” released information about its new browser, codenamed Chrome.
Was it an attack on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or a defense against Safari, Apple’s iPhone browser? Are we witnessing a battle at the top for the best operating system?
In our world saturated with interconnected high-speed networks, there are two major elements: the physical advantage and the portal.
The advantage consists of materials (such as your desktop computer, your laptop or your mobile phone) that are used to do research, carry out banking transactions etc., on the web.
Until then, Google with its dominance over search engines, owns the portal.
Microsoft, through its computers, operating systems and a third of the mobile phone market, holds the physical advantage. However, the innovators Netscape and America Online prove that things move extremely fast in the world of technology. To doze off is synonymous with failure. It’s more like a frenzied game of poker than a patient game of chess. Microsoft tried to offer CIEL and Google with it, but was rebuffed by Yahoo. And now, on the surface at least, Google is trying to eat away at Microsoft’s advantage by getting its own browser.
Make no mistake: it’s not just about browsers. They were the latest battle ground, however there are already several others.
Microsoft has a 70% market share with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox has around 20% and the small Norwegian Opera has an even finer slice. Then there’s Safari from Apple, which has proven itself on Mac computers,and, oh surprise, has 100% of the market share on iPhones. A classic hit. This may well be what Google is preparing for us.
Early versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer were just containers. A server filled this container, therefore your screen, with texts, links, banners and other images. Put together, all these elements constituted an Internet page. Web 1.0 was born, a wholesale digital catalog.
The next generation of browsers that we now use use programs from languages such as Java, PHP, Perl, Python or even Ruby. Internet pages are no longer content to display simple images. They are alive, constantly connected to portal servers to update information, maps, databases and more. These improvements enabled Web 2.0 to begin and spawned new services such as Facebook and MySpace, which almost intimately link the physical advantage and the portal. This analysis also applies to pages like Google Maps which has the ability to “overwrite” and display geographic data.
Chrome seems to have all of these characteristics. No surprises however, indeed this first version brings together all the characteristics of the competition.
However, even this technology is becoming outdated. Not falling asleep, remember? There are two incredibly buoyant new markets. First, the mobile Internet which is already overused. Google is already spending huge sums to try to dethrone Apple’s iPhone with its phone called Android. Google is thinking of integrating its own browser and thereby holding 100% of the new market. It appears that Chrome and Safari have the same core technology so why not?
Despite all the real enthusiasm could come from an Internet with a real ability to adapt. By using the millions of billions of searches we perform every day, Google should have a clear advantage in knowing the real expectations of potential users like us. Google could use what we’re working on, or even where we (and our phones) are.
All of this will require careful balancing between the physical advantage and the portal. Implementing this, or any other new technological shell, will lead to millions of people downloading and sticking with Google. Millions of advertising dollars will naturally follow. If in addition it is really useful, we will all change to Chrome without hesitation.
Mister T was right. No need to defend, the whole strategy lies in the attack. Nothing can change that.
