Corvus Consulting

Among the many rumors of products that Google would one day ship, a home-spun operating system has been among the more persistent and esoteric. What would such an OS look like? How would they ever get it into OEM hardware? Would it be sold or ad-supported? As with Android, the answer is not so much the arrival of what’s expected (g-phone, anyone?) as a reveal that re-frames the original questions.

While today’s launch of Chrome is positioned as a browser built from the ground-up for the age of rich web applications, what Google achieves is much more than another take on an established concept. Rather, Chrome is the shoehorning of Google’s preferred architecture for where it wants to take web apps into the space between the consumer operating system and the cloud. In short, Chrome is Google’s answer to the traditional operating system.

The browser as an operating system to the web is hardly a new idea. Marc Andressen, back in 1995, is said to have mused that Mosaic could well reduce the significance of Windows to that of a ‘set of device drivers.’ Those words might well have sparked the paranoia and loathing that constituted the philosophical underpinnings of Internet Explorer for the next decade. The result of IE has largely been a tax on web development, costing thousands of work-hours coding exceptions to IE’s handling of otherwise standardized concepts. The thinking behind IE is evolving, and in version 8 the default mode is said to be standards compliant. Today is a day too late, however, and IE is left looking like the car that Homer designed, the power of its engine drowning under the confusion of its own bells and whistles.

Lifting the curtain in a creative way, Google commissioned a comic from the brilliant Scott McCloud to lay out the technological motivations behind Chrome. The comic artfully distills a lot of thinking and history, zapping Google employees into the world from the ’80s A-Ha video for Take On Me mashed-up with Facebook’s signature blue. To immerse readers in the problem that Chrome is meant to solve, the comic is offered in Google’s own Book Search interface. What the comic doesn’t talk much about is the business end, so I’ll take a swing at that.

Strategically, Chrome puts a number of objectives into Google’s grasp:

• A consistent and robust target for developing web applications.
• Control over the ‘last mile’ of the Google application experience, aka the user’s environment, and potential presence in offline modes.
• A full out-flanking of the server-side application platform development race a la Facebook and MySpace
• Increased cardinality for Google’s productivity applications, meaning more time spent and attention spent in Google’s environment. This is a full assault on Microsoft’s Office product line as much as it is on IE and Windows itself.
• A full-on money machine. As the world’s largest advertising distributor, Google’s browser will keep end-user attention fixed in its own environment for longer periods of time across all websites that a person visits and possibly in offline modes. It’s nothing short online advertising goldmine.

Like Microsoft, Google often speaks in a language that equates technical achievement with the benefit to end-users, as if all that end-users ever crave is what can be expressed in terms of the technology used. When I’m critical of Google, it’s often along this technocratic line. This frame in particular from the comic made my soul weep a little:

Even though many of my friends with similar values run much of their online life through Google’s applications, I can barely stand the stark aesthetic and abrasive UI. What they might do with a browser makes me shudder, but like many I can set aesthetics aside to get the job done. I just don’t like having to do so, and I don’t relish the idea of a browser that is almost sure to put visual elegance in the back seat. Or tied up and gagged in the trunk, for that matter.

But I think Chrome really will do just that: end the dancing around debris and cleaning out the house that web apps have had to work in so far. Rather than waiting for the browser market to advance itself, Google is moving the whole game forward in ways that Nick Carr thinks will improve web applications in all browsers.

Whatever things I might not like about Google’s aesthetics and priorities, I can’t argue against their innovation at the infrastructure level, and that’s where Chrome will make the difference. Enough of a difference to be more than just a new browser, but in a new breed of operating system that doesn’t supplant the status quo as much as it fills a space that’s been painfully vacant for too long. And that’s true evolution.