Google Chrome's Real Importance: It's All About Choice

I know it's last week's news, but I do have a thought about the significance of Google's Chrome OS announcement.

Many people have hailed it as a direct, earth-shaking challenge to Microsoft by a company with the muscle to make it stick. Some have said that it's a bad idea since we already have Ubuntu and Mac OS. Others point to Google's track record beyond its main search and advertising products as signs that the company can't overcome market inertia or follow through successfully on other initiatives.

All of these points of view have merit. But I think the real significance of Google's move can be seen in a market where Microsoft's dominance has been waning: browsers.

 

It was only seven years ago that Microsoft's browser market share was over 90 percent and many Web developers made sites that only worked well in Internet Explorer, offering up the logic that almost no one else was using an alternative browser.

Sure, Opera was still treading water and Netscape-Mozilla was on life support at AOL. And Linux devotees were building their own browsers. But it was a Microsoft world and it didn't look like that would ever change. They had decisively won the browser wars.

Then what was left of Netscape was cut loose by AOL in 2003 when their open-source Mozilla Project became the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. In 2004, Firefox 1.0 — breaking out of the Mozilla suite — became the standard bearer for the challenge to IE and the movement to support Web standards.

At about the same time, Apple built its Safari browser off of the core components of the Linux-KDE community's open-source Konquerer browser. That foundation, forked into a rendering engine called WebKit, laid the groundwork for Google's own Chrome browser. And, all the while, Opera has followed its own path of innovation, putting an ever-improving browser on more and more Internet-connected platforms.

The net result of this slowly building, multi-pronged attack on the hegemony of IE? Microsoft has been steadily losing browser share, despite responding to the competition with IE7 and IE8. Microsoft's market share is now somewhere in the 65-percent range.

Alright, sorry for the history. I'm feeling like Ken Rudin here. But I think it points the way for OS market and defines the importance of the Chrome OS announcement.

It is the momentum that Google's announcement represents that is so important. Now there is another credible player joining OS X and Ubuntu to challenge Microsoft in the consumer OS space.

Consumers start to think differently when they believe they have more than one good choice. Over time, the alternatives can become the obvious choice. It's a slow process. It's not like everyone just wakes up one day and says, "enough with Microsoft!"

So, that's the key thing to take away from Google's announcement: you have (or will have) real choices.

People who are looking for Chrome OS to replace Windows in short order are placing a bet at long odds. The people betting the smart money are those who expect to see Windows decline over time as a number of OS choices and alternate technologies chip away at its base.