Recently I heard about this new browser from Google called Google Chrome, which will be available in (Surprise! Surprise!) Beta version. The Google guys, true to the innovative streak, made a comic, justifying yet another entry into the world of browsers, already filled up with heavy weights like IE, firefox etc. However after going through the feature list, I was realized that this was not just another browser. It's design was more closer technically to an Operating System, than to a browser.
There is a fundamental paradigm shift happening here. The browser is the new Operating System. We have already seen a ton of web applications, like Spreadsheet, presentation apps etc, most of which were thought to be almost impossible to run in a browser.
Microsoft with its Windows, is entrenched in the Desktop OS market. I do not see any operating system which can challenge its dominance there. But Google has, instead of taking it head-on, is completely circumventing the Operating System, making it as just another commodity. More than 20 years ago, IBM thought that hardware was the key and the operating system did not matter too much. Microsoft came and commoditized the underlying hardware, and things were never the same again.
I see the same thing happening now, with Google commoditizing the Operating System market. Beyond a point, people will stop caring about what OS their machine is running anymore than people now care about what BIOS their machine is running. (Just to complete the analogy, IBM made the mistake of not doing an exclusive license of DOS, which sealed its fate. Microsoft's mistake happened almost 9 years ago with the introduction of the XMLHttpRequest)
A New Era has begun. If Google can pull off this browser thing decently, then history will definitely repeat itself.
1 comment:
Now that you mention about it.. I remember now about a quake version which is going to run in a browser!! if this trend continues.. we will indeed forget about the OS :)
Post a Comment