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(By Richard Koman) What's behind Google's release of its new Chrome browser? While the software boasts some impressive technology, does Google.
On the one hand, observers say, Chrome is an assault on Microsoft, but not in the obvious, browser-war sense. On the other hand, a number of revelations about how Google is using the browser raise substantial privacy concerns.
Indeed, they say, Chrome reveals just how vast Google's ambitions are -- and they go well beyond roughing up Microsoft.
Google vs Microsoft
For starters, Chrome is a "direct attack on Microsoft," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, in an e-mail message. Even the name is a dig. "Microsoft Chrome Effects was the most ambit
ious attempt to transform the Windows front end, and it failed largely due to internal politics and an untimely disagreement with Intel," Enderle said.
Chrome isn't about unseating Internet Explorer but a stab at Microsoft's fundamental life force -- Windows itself. "Chrome is intended to render Windows irrelevant by taking over the windowing system and allowing it to be platform-independent, breaking the dependency over time on legacy Windows applications," Enderle said.
A PC World article pointed out how Chrome is missing numerous features that users take for granted -- a drop-down menu bar, plug-ins and extensions, a powerful history search. But Chrome isn't about users, Enderle said. It's meant to be a "better front end for applications, not Web browsing," he said. "Chrome is a feint at IE but a flanking move on Windows."
Google vs the World?
The computer world is powerfully dominated by Microsoft. To fundamentally change that equation means, in Google CEO Eric Schmidt's estimation, not a power-sharing arrangement but the decimation of the empire. In the language of geopolitics, Microsoft is the Soviet Union. The question is whether Google is Russian leader Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin.
In a piece for ABC News called "Is Google Turning into Big Brother?" Michael Malone posited that Google announced its new browser on a national holiday in hopes of making Chrome look like an afterthought. The reason? "Google's ambitions are bigger than most of us have ever imagined, and the company is now rich enough, and powerful enough, to execute them -- even if it means the short-term sacrifice of a major new revenue source."
If Google does pull off its strategy, "it will be the most valuable company on the planet. It will also be the scariest and we should start worrying about that right now," Malone wrote.
'Scary' Big Brother
What's so scary? A number of recent revelations about Chrome -- from an end-user license agreement that originally gave Google a perpetual license to all content transmitted through the browser (Google rewrote that) to the fact that Chrome by default transmits browsing history to Google -- suggest to Malone that Google is serious about controlling all the data on the Web.
"Microsoft only wanted all of our money. Increasingly, it seems that Google wants all of our data," Malone wrote.
But while Google presents itself as the Yeltsin to Microsoft's Mikhail Gorbachev, tearing down Redmond's foundations of Windows, IE and Office, Google's true aim may be to consolidate the old power under a new crown. "This isn't a revenue play; the goal is to both destroy Microsoft and replace it, and what they plan has a high probability of being successful," Enderle said.
"Google's intentions appear to go well beyond Microsoft and suggest a level of control and power that AT&T, IBM and Microsoft couldn't even dream of. For what they are attempting, the word 'scary' is incredibly inadequate," Enderle said.
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