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By Krishna, July 12, 2009

Bruce Eckel, one of my favorite book authors, has a thinly disguised anti-Microsoft screed titled “The Cathedral and the Pirate” with Google Chrome OS used as a bludgeon. Apparently, Microsoft is a cathedral and Google is the pirate which can run rings around the cathedral – oops, mixed metaphor – galleons. Eckel also compares Microsoft to a water buffalo and a net in the jungle which he is at it.

There are many areas where Eckel goes wrong, but let me point out a few. For example, he says:

you could take a bigger risk and redefine the playing field by creating your own browser, and then implement the most advanced technologies, correctly, or at least the way you want them. At some point — you’ve got enough clout, after all — you can start saying “this application will only run properly under Google Chrome.” And for that matter, you can start shipping Chrome with all the necessary support for offline storage and connection to the operating system services required to create more sophisticated apps. “Developers, developers, developers!” will soon start creating their own apps that will only run under Chrome, just because it’s the easiest path (they already know JavaScript, but now it works without pain and they have access to storage and other OS things, but sandboxed so they don’t have to worry about viruses and other corruption).

If I remember my history of browsers correctly, Internet Explorer was in the situation where they owned 90% of the browser market. Many web and application developers only tested against IE because it was not worth testing against Netscape or other browsers. But Firefox came with better features and slowly eroded IE’s advantage. Why should Google Chrome be any different?

Any feature (including offline storage) implemented by Google Chrome will be copied by other browsers, especially Firefox, but also IE and Safari. Why should people switch to Chrome then? The non-Microsoft crowd is already invested heavily in Firefox, so there is limited scope for growth for Chrome.

Eckel raises the specter of viruses quite often in his article, but they are mostly strawmen. He says that his brother spends half his time cleaning up virus-infected systems in small and medium businesses. But could those businesses switch to netbooks? A better answer would be to move to Linux or Mac OSX systems. This argument also ignores the strides Windows has made in terms of security and how much people pay attention to security when they buy systems.

Microsoft is targeting netbooks with Windows 7 Starter edition that will probably have lower OEM prices. The extra cost that Windows (or any other standard OS) adds to netbooks is more than offset by allowing them to run different applications. Unless Google Chrome OS has a version of every desktop application that can run on Chrome, the price argument is a non-starter.

Netbooks is a high-risk, low-margin market segment that is under attack from two sides (cell phones and laptops). And Google Chrome OS faces the same risk. Laptops, as desktop replacements, need full-fledged OSes. So the best bet for Google is Android because here it can credibly compete with the other mobile OSes.

As for Microsoft, yes, its margins will decline with decreasing costs of hardware, but Windows will stay around for a long time. That, however, will be a topic for a future post.

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By Krishna, July 11, 2009

Farhad Manjoo of Slate takes down the upcoming Google Chrome OS:

But here’s the crucial sticking point for Chrome: Because it’s based on a Web browser, every app developed for Chrome will also run perfectly on Windows or the Mac. By definition, then, Microsoft and Apple machines will always be able to do more than Chrome machines—they’ll be able to run Web apps and the processor-intensive desktop programs that we’ll still need in our glorious Webby future: movie-editing software and CAD programs, for instance. [...]

This is what Google said:

For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

If all the Google Chrome OS apps can run on other operating systems, you would want a Google Chrome-OS machine if

• You only want/need to use web applications.
• You are very price-sensitive.

I am not even sure if the latter applies, because presumably you could replicate Google Chrome OS by using a Firefox+Linux installation at the same cost. Why would netbook companies even use Google Chrome? Is Google paying partners to install Google Chrome OS on their netbooks, a reverse OEM licensing situation. Manjoo blasts Google’s business sense:

If 20 percent of the world’s computer users switched from Windows to Chrome, would that help Google’s bottom line? Sure, all those people would now be using Gmail and Google Docs—but they could have been doing that in Windows, too! An MBA might describe the Chrome OS as a wasteful customer acquisition expense; Google would be wiser to use all the cash that it’s pouring into developing the new program for advertising instead. But a gangster would call this move what it really is: The point of Chrome OS—the only point of Chrome OS—is to screw with Microsoft.

In fact, the whole concept of netbooks seems weird to me. Cell phones are becoming so powerful these days that for most tasks done on the go, you don’t need anything else. You can find laptops that are light and thin enough to carry around with you without being a burden. Wireless broadband cards enable you to access the Internet from different systems instead of being tied down to one machine.

Netbooks, by definition, occupy a place between cell phones and laptops. And therefore, they will be squeezed by ever-increasing functionality of the former and ever-increasing price declines of the latter. Secondly, the type of person that needs a netbook is a person who also needs a powerful cell phone and a laptop. So far from being a replacement for anything, a netbook would be an additional device, further reducing its reach.

Now, the share of netbooks in all laptops jumped from 1% to 19% in 2008. But apparently, that seems to include netbooks that are very close to being called laptops if it weren’t for their size. In any case, the type of netbooks that Google Chrome OS would serve is a niche within netbooks where, if I understand correctly, no local application other than Google Chrome would run.

Google, of all Microsoft competitors, has the best chance to supplant Windows with a different operating system. Google Chrome is a fantastic browser – I am using it now as my default browser. Yet, I cannot see this as a real game-changer unlike people like Paul Thurrott. I would think that Android has a much better chance to become big in the long run.

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By Krishna, June 1, 2009

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is out. At first glance, it looks better visually than Microsoft’s previous attempt, live.com. The organization of results with easy access to search history, related searches and businesses is well done. I also like the infinite results in Images Search (which live.com also had) and the super-clear (even if slow) Bird’s Eye view in the Maps section. Search seems to be working okay for most items. I faced one issue when it brought up “Derry, NH” as the first result when I searched for my present hometown “Londonderry, NH”.

This is a good attempt by Microsoft, but I am not sure how much market share it can pull from Google at this late juncture in the search game. I know the money is all in the ads part, but Google has created a massive ecosystem with many products that complement its search engine. To name a few, Google Custom Search, Google Webmasters, Google Analytics, FeedBurner, etc. are products that have brought in web developers all over the world into embracing Google search.

Microsoft, to some extent, faces a chicken-and-egg problem. For web developers to take its search engine seriously, it has to show more people using it and clicking through to websites. At that point, developers will start to work about their pages ranking high on Bing and they will clamor for tools. This self-reinforcing cycle will build up the momentum. But at this point, Microsoft search has few users and people are not very bothered with search results on live.com.

Several months ago, when my company was spending money on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ads, we found that there was little click-through on Microsoft ads. In addition, both as an absolute value and as a proportion of visitors, Microsoft search was way below Google and Yahoo! I noticed the same pattern on my blogs for organic search. Both my blogs have only 0.5% traffic from live.com, while Google has between 80% to 95% of the traffic on any given day.

In general, if you are a web developer, keep monitoring the traffic coming from Bing and until you start seeing an appreciable quantity, you can safely ignore with respect to your development activities.

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By Krishna, February 27, 2009

Microsoft’s neglect of Internet Explorer over the years has finally caught up to them. IE 8, while a significant improvement over IE 7, lags behind Google Chrome and now the latest Apple Safari browser. Here are some of the significant drawbacks to using IE 8:

1. Slower Launch Time: For a long time, IE’s main advantage was its launch speed. It has become so bloated that you could launch Chrome after IE, and Chrome would appear earlier. Opening a new tab is not only slow, but blocking, so that you have to wait. Compare that with the performance of Firefox. This may get better in future releases, but right now the way IE launches and handles a process for each tab is terrible.
2. Both an Address box and a Search box: Chrome has done away with the search box and allows you to search directly from the address box. It also shows you possible results for what you are typing. Having both the boxes is simply unnecessary. This would have been understandable in the previous IE release, but considering how much IE 8 does with both the address bar and the search box, Microsoft could have integrated them into a single object.
3. No Dashboard: Opera, Chrome and Safari allow you to have a home page from where you can launch your favorite sites. Chrome does this automatically by showing the sites you visit most frequently and allows you to search your navigation history. It also shows you the most recently closed tabs and lets you launch them again. The most appealing aspect of this feature is that the browser remembers your navigation history in that tab.
4. Still No Favorites Manager: Incredible as it seems, after all these years, there is no easy way to manage your favorites in Internet Explorer. Every other browser has a bookmark manager that allows you to easily add and delete bookmarks and folders. Microsoft boxed itself into a corner by saving IE favorites as individual files, but that is not really an excuse for providing a better way to manage favorites.

Many of the new IE 8 features (such as private browsing) have been available in other browsers for some time now. However, I don’t want to suggest that IE 8 is entirely bad news. As I said, it improves upon IE 7 and comes closer to offerings by competitors. Some features such as accelerators and a better Find feature provide productivity gains. Overall though, IE 8 leaves you feeling unsatisfied.