Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

bluelines — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:35:22 -0000

Hank Williams doesn't say that IE6 is still working fine for most people. He says it truly sucks, but tragically has 25% of the OS market. The truth is most people don't know how to install a new browser on their PC, and in my direct experience many people don't actually know what Firefox is (not joking). These are the people who, through no fault of their own, simply think that computers utterly suck and make their lives more miserable than happy, and that's the only way things are.

It's such a travesty that Microsoft has not only inflicted such a dreadful user experience on the majority, but also conditioned them to think it's tolerable and normal.

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

roland — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:11:12 -0000

multiple open source products all working together in a usable fashion is a great vision! now if only google would open source all of their stuff :-) !

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

mathewi — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:19:09 -0000

That's a good analogy, Jim. It does seem as though Google wants to
control many different aspects of how we experience the Web --
including things like Android -- in much the same way Apple wants
hardware and software to work together to offer a single user
experience. At least Google is making an attempt to keep things open
source though.

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

JimAtJaxtr — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:56:03 -0000

Interesting thoughts. What Google is doing seems to be along the lines of Apple methodology--just the concept of having multiple products all working seamlessly together. So they keep gathering more and more pieces to draw in different segments of people. Short term, I don't think Chrome really dents the market, but longterm, it may be a different scenario as Google continues to prove the value and functionality of its products to different groups of people over time.

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

antje — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:03:51 -0000

I think it will take more from FF than anything (doesn't Google support Mozilla anyway? How's that going to play?)

The IE6 users are not going to move unless forced. There is a huge market out there with a mentality of "don't touch my system, don't upgrade, don't do anything - it works and I want it left as is..." Huge.

PS some of our users still use netscape....

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

leigh — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:14:16 -0000

I think you're right Mathew from a cloud vs. desktop perspective I don't think Google is having it's eggs in the right basket. Browsers seem to crash far more than my desktop apps do. I can only imagine having my browser with all my ten windows of applications all going kaput at the same time? Kill me now.

But I think that Mark is right that it does matter from a browser war perspective and how that might fit into their strategy as the world's largest advertising company is in my mind the thing to watch.

Re: Chrome may be great, but will it matter?

buckpost — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:23:08 -0000

Chrome will matter because it will create a second consumer-friendly alternative to IE - apologies to Safari and Opera fans. Given it's Google and assuming Chrome will be user-friendly, it will probably attract a lot of users.

Let's assume Chrome carves out 10% of the browser market - perhaps half of that from Firefox and half from IE. That will means IE could be down to 60% market share, which is a long way from the 90% + it had not so long ago.

This is one reason Chrome will matter.

Then, you've got the whole OS side of the house.