Why does it seem a rule of nature that the closer a company gets to delivering new Web 2.0 applications or software tools, the more its executives fall victim to hubris? Faceboook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his well-chronicled miscalculations with advertising and members’ privacy are an obvious example. But Google deserves special mention for succumbing to arrogance without justification. And we need not single out CEO Eric Schmidt – the entire top staff seems to have entered a reality-distortion field.
In their recent announcement of Chrome – the company’s new open-source operating system for netbooks and smartbooks – Google execs Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson describe it as “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.” They promise not only “speed, simplicity and security,” including freedom from viruses and malaware, but a host of new web-based applications that will run on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux, “thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.”
At least Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had the decency to be annoying in predictable ways, hauling out prototypes of products so far ahead of shipment as to be not far removed from vaporware. But in the recent disclosures about Chrome, Google was barely able to muster the equivalent of a rough draft to show the world. Instead, the company boasted of taking on Microsoft through the marriage of a Linux core and Chrome browser.
It seems plausible enough that Google will eventually produce an adequate combination of operating system, services, and browser to become an important competitor in the war for smartbooks. But boasting of having a Windows-killer in hand is, shall we say, a bit premature. There is an analogy to be drawn with Wired magazine’s recent coverage of the Justice Department’s probe of a possible anti-trust case with Google. Justice officials were befuddled to learn that Google’s top executives actually thought that a claim of “It’s OK, we’re Google” was a substantive defense.
Potential problems
Meanwhile, there are at least two significant problems with the pre-prototype public relations game Google is playing:
First, relying on an open-source core means that the company will have to compete with numerous Linux advocates who may have good ideas for value-added services on top of a common operating system. Yes, Google is a giant with untold millions to spend on R&D, and yes, it could always buy a small scrappy company with a good vertical software offering. But this does not change the fact that a broad base of Linux startups represents a potential speed bump in Google’s path to world domination.
The second issue centers on the genuine concerns Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain raised in a recent New York Times op-ed piece on the potential ramifications of “cloud computing.” Chrome gains much of its performance by offloading a computer’s tasks and many background functions, via the Internet, to remotely-located servers. Zittrain cautions, however, that the more our personal computing and handheld devices sacrifice their local processing capability, the more that users need to worry about civil liberties and privacy violations. Cloud computing may be effective for handling non-sensitive aggregate data from the corporate data center, but it is a decidedly mixed bag for individual users. Thus, Chrome’s alleged advantage also is its partial weakness.
Let’s not count Chrome out of the race, by any means. But let’s hope that Google halts its claims of superior performance or likely user-adoption advantage over Microsoft platforms until the company actually has something to show. Then let’s talk about security issues.
Loring
