We got inklings of Google’s master plan to rule the universe. The first volley was the Google Chrome browser so they could deal with web services their way. Next came Android because they wanted to deal with mobile devices their way. Google also made a tiny detour to try to fix Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser by providing a plugin to embed a Chrome browser in IE when IE wasn’t up to the task of doing what they wanted. Google showed its full hand (I think) yesterday by formally announcing and showing Google Chrome OS.
This super-focus on web pages will, I think, become a problem for Google shortly. The interesting, but somewhat oddball update…
You know the saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” Well, if all you have is a web browser, everything looks like a web page. And, this just ain’t gonna work in the long run. The situation we’re in now is similar to what we saw in the early 1990s when the computer world was in a painful in-between stage between single tasking MS-DOS and the fully GUI (or mostly so) multi-tasking (kind of sort of) Windows 95. There were some really wild attempts in between DOS and Windows to shoehorn character-based windows and memory managers that simulated multitasking or at least trying to allow multiple applications to be loaded at the same time in DOS. The tiny UNIX/Linux/X11 world had mostly figured this out even then. But, the vast majority of people struggled without looking to that solution.
We’re going to muddle through all this confusion for the next few years. Hang on for a rough ride.
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