It was inevitable that, once a company boasted of its incapacity to do evil, it would be placed under the microscope as soon as its market presence started challenging industry leaders. Google found itself tied to the whipping post this week, even as key players like Acer talked of expanding Chrome presence outside smartbooks. Of course, on some fronts, the party leading the castigation was none other than Microsoft, which calls the whole campaign into question.
The most balanced and legitimate series of complaints this week came from Brian Wilson at the UK’s popular Inquirer site, which was spurred in part by a speech that Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith gave in Brussels, in which he warned that Google may face antitrust inquiries regarding the tie-in of ads to search engine results. Frankly, Smith was making a no-brainer observation, as the Justice Department already is probing Google on a number of fronts.
Wilson used this news nugget to improvise on a long riff regarding the dangers inherent in Google controlling end-to-end software environments, mentioning Google’s growing presence in development tools like the Google Web Toolkit, and its well-known foray into cloud computing through the yet-to-launch OS portion of Chrome. Wilson’s point is that Google already has become the next Microsoft, and will likely face the same scrutiny and criticism Microsoft faced over the last 20 years. How ironic and predictable, then, that Microsoft chose to lead the pack in warning of Google-uber-alles control. Been there, done that.
Of course, this dispute will be of growing relevance in the smartbook and netbook realms, because of OEMs like Acer, who said this week that it would move to at least a 5 percent presence of the Chrome OS in its product mix. Acer’s statements seemed to suggest that Chrome platforms would extend beyond smartbooks, into netbooks and perhaps notebooks. Now, realistically, that places Chrome at a level still trailing Linux. And Wilson was right in praising Google for embracing open-source interfaces and open software standards more than its competitor.
Still, with Google’s market share in searches making Bing efforts look paltry, it behooves us to pay attention to these often catty disputes. Eric Schmidt cannot get away with saying “we’re not evil” and expecting consumers to simply nod their heads. We may soon see a world in which the netbook sector is controlled by the big bad Wintel duopoly, while the smartbook sector is controlled by the big bad Google. At least we can rely on several ARM licensees to break the chain!
Loring
