As Google prepares to blow out the 10 candles on top of its birthday cake this Sunday, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin can be forgiven for cracking a wry smile as they reflect upon the fire they have just lit under Microsoft.
The conflagration that has the creator of Windows running for the fire extinguisher was caused by Google’s launch of its own internet browser. The arrival of Chrome, announced in typically idiosyncratic style through the medium of an online comic strip this week, represents more than just a challenge to Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer. It represents a fundamental fight over the future of the computer.
Microsoft, as so many potential rivals have found over the years, has a stranglehold over the market for the software that runs computers thanks to its hugely successful Windows operating system. So Google has taken heed of the old adage that if you cannot win, change the game.
The rise of broadband internet access has finally created an environment where applications such as word processors or spreadsheet programs do not need to reside on a computer. Instead they can be run on the internet and the documents created can be stored on web servers so they can be accessed from anywhere a person can get online. In a world where such web-based applications abound, it does not matter what operating system a computer runs because all it needs to have is an internet browser and an internet connection. In that world, a user could even opt for a free operating system.
It’s a change that Bill Gates himself foresaw when 13 years ago he wrote an internal memo in which he assigned the “highest level of importance” to the internet and warned his colleagues that it was a potential “tidal wave” that could fundamentally alter the rules.
That memo mentioned then market-leading browser Netscape as having the potential to “commoditize the underlying operating system”. That infamous memo was one of the catalysts of the browser wars of the late 1990s, which ultimately saw Internet Explorer crush Netscape Navigator, and it also included a line about ensuring that makers of computers ship their machines with a Microsoft browser pre-installed. That practice landed Microsoft in court and led to the effective split of the company. But by then the damage was done and Netscape ended up in the hands of AOL before disappearing all but completely.
When Gates testified as part of the anti-trust case brought against the company 10 years ago he was asked what that line about “commoditizing the operating system” had meant. He replied: “They were creating a product that would either reduce the value or eliminate demand for the Windows operating system if they continued to improve it and we didn’t keep improving our product.”
Firefox cub
Ironically, Chrome, which has been roughly two years in the making, builds upon innovations made in browser technology by Microsoft’s rival Mozilla, custodian of the Firefox browser, some of whose technological DNA comes from Netscape Navigator.
But the browser wars of a decade ago do not live on just within the technology of Chrome, but in Google’s decision to create it in the first place. The search engine’s chief executive admitted after the launch that “the browser wars of 10 years ago were right: the browser matters”.
Brin added that “operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world. They have become kind of bulky … We [web users] want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone are shrinking.”
That is bad news for Microsoft, which makes a significant chunk of its revenues from its Windows operating system and Office suite of software, both of which sit upon the computer itself.
Google, of course, makes pretty much all of its revenues from online search. It has gone from a doctoral project at Stanford University to the world’s largest search engine in 10 years, blasting through the traditional media and advertising industries on the way. It is now one of the world’s most trusted and recognised brands.
Over the past few years, the company has moved into online applications and services such as email, word processing, calendars, instant messaging, maps, spreadsheets and even bought the online video phenomenon YouTube.
But ultimately everything it does is about persuading people to do more with the internet. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to search for something and the more likely they are to generate revenues for Google or queries that help improve its search algorithm. So why would it want to dabble with browsers?
Firstly, the sense that Google’s executives have given over the past few days is that if the rest of the industry had produced good enough browsers, there would have been no need for them to create Chrome.
Announcing the launch of Chrome - which was leaked after a Google staffer posted a copy of the 38-page comic that heralded the move - the company said on its website: “People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.
“We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”
Android attack
Chrome, according to early testers, is certainly faster than many of the browsers already in the market - especially the current version of Internet Explorer - and it has been engineered so that if one website being visited freezes up, the entire program does not crash.
Google has moved into another area - mobile phones - for roughly similar reasons. The creation of its Android operating system for mobile phones - the first device that runs it is expected in time for Christmas - owes much to the fact that the mobile internet has been promised for years but the industry’s love of proprietary systems has held back its arrival.
The first gadget to deliver on the promise of the mobile web, Apple’s iPhone, owes some of its success to the fact that it is an “open” platform, so anyone who uses common web standards can create applications for it. Android is also an open mobile platform, in the same way as Chrome is an open browser platform.
But Chrome is also a crucial defensive play for Google. If you rely - as it does - on people having access to the internet to make your money you not only want to make it as simple as possible but ensure no one gets in your way.
The new, eighth version of Internet Explorer, which is due out soon, includes the ability to view web pages anonymously. Erasing a user’s online footprints would make it harder for Google to collect the data about visitors that it uses to improve search results and serve relevant adverts.
Chrome also has an anonymous browsing mode - which has quickly been dubbed “porn mode” because it hides details of where the user has been from other users of the same machine - but Google will still know what that user has been doing online.
Then there is the fact that browsers increasingly contain search boxes within them, raising the risk that a popular new browser could slowly squeeze Chrome out of the market by signing up with a rival search engine.
Google has already been hedging its bets. It has a deal with the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit-making organisation that funds the development of Firefox, the web’s second most popular browser, to have its search box within the browser itself. Just last month Google extended that deal - which has recently generated more than three quarters of Mozilla’s revenues - until 2011. Google’s toolbar is already standard on Apple’s Safari browser and can also be downloaded and installed on Internet Explorer.
Chrome has excited the tech world but ultimately it
all comes down to money and for Google that means more people searching more often. As Citigroup put it in a note to clients this week: “Given that search has become such a fundamental part of internet usage, anything that impacts overall internet usage is important for Google.”
Backstory
Google is either more than 12, nearly 11, exactly 10 tomorrow or not quite 10 years old, depending on which event is taken as its birth. While still at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on technology that would become the forerunner of Google by January 1996. It was called BackRub, because it analysed back links - essentially the links to a site from other sites.
BackRub was “let loose” in March 1996. Brin and Page had created an algorithm that ranked pages by importance - PageRank, which is still at the heart of Google today. The bigger the internet got, they reckoned, the bigger the search engine would get, which led them to name it after googol, the term for the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros. Google was launched in August 1996
Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000, making the cheque out to Google Inc, which did not exist. So on September 7 1998 Brin and Page incorporated Google as a company.
