Google, the integrated software company

Everyone has been going gaga over Google’s new browser, Chrome. I actually had to work today (teaching classes), so since I’m coming late, let me point to other coverage. The announcement was made in the Google blog, which referenced the Google comic book (officially released on Google books but more readably presented by Blogoscoped).

Om Malik (as is often the case) has an incisive summary of the new software’s features, while Walt Mossberg and the Merc each have a first test drive.

There’s lots of speculation about Chrome being aimed at Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. As of August, market share is 72.2% IE, 19.7% Firefox, 6.4% Safari, and 0.7% Opera and Netscape. (Of the Safari, 0.3% is iPhone, up 58% from July to August). Kara Swisher (of the WSJ-owned site AllThingsD) is skeptical about Google’s chances of winning a browser war:

Google’s in no danger of foundering, given its search business still dominates and quite profitably, of course.

But, for all the halo of that, Google has also never had any other similar true home run with any of the other products it has released so far.

Of course, Chrome is obviously the Android browser, since (as with Android) it’s Google’s browser based on WebKit. Apple already has a browser based on WebKit — it’s called Safari, available for Windows.

While Chrome has more features than Safari, the main difference appears to the new Javascript virtual machine (called V8) from its virtual machine development group in Denmark (replacing SquirrelFish, the most recent WebKit Javascript interpreter). The main difference (according to the comic book) is the multithreaded VM.

Still, why does Google have to go off and make its own browser, given that Apple is already making one? Why not work together? (After all, Google’s CEO is on Apple’s board). Google’s hubris (some would say arrogance) en route to Total World Domination seems to require its go-it-alone strategy, just as with Android it’s calling all the shots and not cooperating with other embedded Linux efforts.

The answer is that this is not about browser wars: this is what strategy professors call “multipoint competition,” in this case over competing hopes for Total World Domination. Microsoft dominated the software industry in the 1990s, and Google is determined to claim that mantle within 5 years.

This means that any software that Microsoft offers Google will eventually offer as well. If it can overcome its hubris, perhaps Google will partner or ally to deliver with other members of the anti-Microsoft camp. I suspect it will always choose weaker partners (like Yahoo or Sun) to keep control rather than strong ones (such as Apple or IBM), at least until that time later this century when it abandons hopes for Total World Domination.

By competing with Microsoft, Google is en route to be a fully integrated software producer, one that happens to deliver more (but not all) of its software as a network service rather than a client-based application. This is a fully integrated stack — from its Android variant of Linux through Chrome to Google-hosted services — rather than the vertical integration of inputs and outputs that characterized 20th century innovation leaders.

Google’s mantra (repeated at the official Chrome intro) is that the browser is not a browser, but a computing platform. This is an update (15 years later) of Sun’s old mantra “the network is the computer.” Unlike with Sun, Google will own both sides of the network used by hundreds of millions (if not billions) of consumers: the client browser, applets that run on the client, and the server stack that delivers those applets and services over the Internet.

Update: It is now clear that Chrome and Android have separate forks of the WebKit open source project, even if someday they may be merged back together.

Evaluating Ajax alternatives

Ajax has been a central part of Google’s efforts to design richer, client-independent Internet applications. I think by any measure it’s been a success, in part fueled by (and fueling) the success of WebKit, the open source HTML rendering engine developed by Apple engineers.

In the August issue of IEEE Computer, George Lawton authored a 3-page summary of “New Way to Build Rich Internet Applications.”

The article lists two major Ajax development tools: the Google Web Toolkit and Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax. It also lists the non-Ajax alternatives: Adobe solutions (Flash, AIR and Flex), Microsoft Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX.

I haven’t been a code-level engineer since Palomar closed in 2004, and I haven’t had occasion to create any Internet apps other than many pages of HTML and a few small fragments of Perl and Javascript. However, I found the article provided a helpful overview of the competing RIA technologies, with no obvious axes to grind.

The one odd thing was only a single passing reference to Eclipse. Its Rich Ajax Platform version 1.0 was released 11 months ago. It leverages the existing Eclipse Rich Client Platform architecture that is the basis of many Eclipse applications from the past five years.

Understanding the iPhonatics

At CTIA this week, Rubicon Consulting released a survey of 460 US iPhone users. The 35 page study is signed by Mike Mace, co-author of my iPhone paper.

A few key points:

• the most time is spent on e-mail, but the device increases browsing too.
• a third of the audience carry a second phone.
• the iPhone increased bills by $228 annually, half of the users switched to AT&T, and AT&T gained an additional $2 billion in annual service revenue.

About 40% switched from other smartphones — which in the US are not surprisingly Blackberry or Windows Mobile — and 50% switched from another phone such as a Motorola Razr. 75% of the customers either own an iPod or Mac.

The report listed two major challenges. First, the WebKit-enabled iPhone browsing doesn’t work on certain websites. (The report doesn’t mention it, but Nokia S60 uses the same browser technology).

Second, the iPhone has won the most innovative users,† but can it appeal to a broader market? This was a question for the iPod and Newton, too — one made it and the other didn’t — although the Newton never even got close to early adopters, let alone the “chasm”.

My rough reading is that Apple is roughly on track — it’s achieved its beachhead, but it has a long way to go to become mass market. And (as with any innovator) its rivals are not going to stand still.


† The report says “early adopter”, which is a technical term in innovation diffusion research that specifically refers to a market penetration of 2.5-16%, but is often misused by practitioners to mean anything in the first 15-20%. With a 17% share of new North American sales in 2007 (not installed base), early adopter (“visionary” in Geoff Moore terms) is a plausible categorization for the US. But in Europe, it’s clearly at the innovator (Rogers) or enthusiast (Moore) stage of 0-2.5%.

iPhone Flashpoint

Although I no longer read the daily WSJ, Larry Gagnon of ZDNet pointed me to an interesting article today on the WSJ website (by former CNET reporter Ben Charny) about Flash on the iPhone.

Adobe has successfully created a new platform with Flash, Adobe wants the iPhone to ship Flash. Mobile platforms are a strategically important source of growth for Adobe. As of last October, it had 300 million installs on 430 phone models and 140 device models, and mobile/device revenues (for both Flash and Acrobat) were $52.5 million, up 40%.

So far Apple isn’t cooperating, and went so far as to use a work-around to get YouTube on the iPhone without providing Flash. Today Adobe needs Apple’s cooperation because Apple tightly controls third party apps on the iPhone; even on the ISV-friendly OS X, Apple retains some control such as for apps that require low-level interfaces.

Once the new SDK ships (this month?), the iPhone will become a feasible target for a wider range of third-party apps. At that point, Apple’s attitudes could range from

1. bundle it and pay a royalty
2. bundle it if it can get out of a royalty (not very likely)
3. treat Flash as a strategically important application and help Adobe develop a Flash port for the iPhone — which it then can distribute as it sees fit
4. treat Adobe like any other ISV (which is to say, not go out of its way to support a very popular application)
5. do what it can to discourage/prevent Flash for the iPhone, such as by changing APIs or allowing it on its redistribution site.

The WSJ makes it seem like Apple is at #4 or #5.

Neither side is talking, but the key issues would appear to be:

• Processor usage. Flash is a resource pig, although Flash Lite supposedly runs on a 150 MHz ARM chip. The iPhone has a 620 MHz ARM chip, but that chip is severely taxed right now.
• Royalties. Adobe gets 20¢ per phone for preloaded software, but nothing if the software is downloaded by the user (e.g. for Symbian or Windows Mobile).
• Platform control. Flash is a classic closed standard — even more closed than Windows — in that Adobe controls the APIs and no third party implementations are available. By comparison, Apple supports Adobe’s PDF standard on OS X but has its own implementation of a PDF reader that lags Adobe’s by several generations but for most purposes is good enough.

IMHO this last point is the most important one. Flash is a prerequisite to using an increasing number of websites, as I found trying to go without for several years. (Still, it was only GrandCentral that caused me to finally install it). Apple is gambling that Adobe needs the iPhone more than the iPhone needs Flash.

John Gruber has a long post about why he believes Apple will not help bring Flash to the iPhone. It appears that we don’t agree on much, but we agree here:

Apple doesn’t control the HTML/CSS/JavaScript web standards, but neither does anyone else. And Apple does control and own WebKit, which is by anyone’s measure the best mobile implementation of these standards today.

Flash, on the other hand, is (from Apple’s perspective) the wrong sort of proprietary — owned and controlled by another company.

Gruber notes (correctly) that Flash may have won on the desktop, but the mobile web is still wide open.

The iPhone has an opportunity to influence those mobile standards far out of proportion to its market share (of about 6% of new smartphone sales). As Google told the Financial Times last week, Google “had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset”.

My bet is that for 2008, Apple will continue to promulgate WebKit and work with Google (Ajax etc.) to make websites work well with the iPhone using open standards. I also expect Adobe to ship its own Flash player (with or without Apple’s help) in Q2 or Q3 of this year.

The real issue is whether mobile-oriented websites will develop assuming a Flash player, and then require iPhone users to download a copy of Flash Lite — or whether they will follow the Google-iPhone web application model.

The triumph of WebKit

I’m sorry to be here in San José instead of Barcelona, because this sounds like a particularly momentous 3GSM conference this year. There’s such a huge amount of news that even from 7,000 miles away it’s impossible to keep up, although the FT coverage (and that of CNET and Engadget Mobile) helps.

Although there’s been a lot of coverage about Google’s gPhone prototypes at MWC, I found an article about Google’s business model to be more interesting.

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years”, Mr Gundotra said.

Of course, more searches equals more page views of Google-served ads. Does it mean more click throughs? We assume that, but of course there’s not enough of a track record to tell.

This is a clear validation of Google’s efforts to work with Apple to make the iPhone the premier mobile Internet device. Apple deserves a lot of credit for showing others what to do, and will receive abundant flattery through imitation over the next few years.

What I think it makes clear, however, is the triumph of WebKit — a fast, lean, standards-based open source browser that is rapidly gaining share. It’s Apple’s desktop browser, its iPhone browser, Nokia’s S60 browser, Google’s Android browser, and — as a presentation last month at Mobile Monday made clear, coming soon to Windows Mobile.

The next opportunity is obviously to bring WebKit to the 10% of the smartphone world that uses Blackberries. Strangely, an open source effort to port WebKit to Symbian UIQ seems to be stalled — you would think the Sony Ericsson (or UIQ) bureaucracy could spare an engineer for six months to help along the conversion.

WebKit’s success means that mobile websites will eventually be targeted for WebKit browsers — unless somehow Mozilla can up with clean fast code soon. Since WebKit is open source, Apple may be able to put a unique UI on its iPhone but not a unique web rendering engine.

All browser implementations of HTML etc. standards have their quirks. Today many sites don’t work with Safari’s. However, if you have market share then website operators will have to write their code to be compatible with those quirks.

More importantly for Google, if everyone is running Ajax-compatible WebKit browsers, it can develop cross-platform web apps for the vast majority of the smartphone world while others are still figuring out how to port their native apps.

Who's ready for the mobile web?

In January, Mike Mace and I both had an intuitive feel that the iPhone was going to change the mobile phone industry. Four months after the first iPhone shipped, I think our intuition has been born out to a greater or lesser degree.

Aided by very satisfied customers and the consequential word of mouth, Apple sold nearly 1.4 million iPhones in the first 94 days. This is AT&T's top selling phone (at 13%) and 4th overall in the US. Of course, Apple is not #4 overall since most vendors sell dozens of models.

In particular, one thing came through loud and clear last week at the CTIA Wireless IT conference (the premier mobile web conference in the US). Admirers and rivals admitted that Apple finally did a mobile browser right, and that accounts for much of its success (an advantage emphasized by their current advertising).

Web browsing solves the fragmentation of the US market, and provides a least common denominator between desktop and cellphone. If all app developers, content providers, cellular operators and mobile phone makers all agreed to use the web -- based on W3C and IETF open standards -- then the mobile Internet couldn't be any more open than that. This openness and ubiquity would eanble all sort of positive network effects to spur adoption, and leverage off the installed base of the wired Internet. Another factor for openness is that Apple's iPhone browser is based on WebKit, the open source project Apple created (from KHTML), which in turn reduces the barriers to imitation for its web browser. (In case web apps aren't enough, this month Apple adddressed the criticism about a "closed" iPhone by announcing it will release formal software development kit for native apps in February.)

If Apple establishes the browser as the key enabler of the mobiler Internet, how well situated are the major handset vendor? Based on Q3 2007 sales estimates, here's the list and my prediction:

• Nokia (38.6%). It ships more smartphones than anyone, owns S60 and the largest share of Symbian Ltd. It has been taking more risks with software than any other cell phone company, including its Maemo web tablet platform. Even if we worried about Nokia falling behind, they are already ready to match Apple by porting WebKit to S60.
• Samsung (14.7%). Has a wide range of software strategies, including Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and its own OS. Historically the Koreans don't grok software, but S60 will have a good browser and Windows Mobile could too (assuming Mobile IE is a fully compatible browser) -- so it may depend on the mix of software platforms they are selling.
• Motorola (12.9%). Like Samsung, Motorola has a mix of platforms: Windows Mobile, Symbian UIQ and its own solution (now shifting towards mobile Linux). Although in principle Linux should have a great browser, Motorola once said that the browser choice was up to the carrier.
• Sony Ericsson (9.0%). SE's smartphone strategy is tied to UIQ -- a Symbian OS layer that it used to own but is now going to share with Motorola. Since UIQ 3.0, UIQ has depended on the Opera browser, which has yet to inspire the enthusiasm of WebKit.

Any others? I think HTC will do well, because it thus far has made its impact with Windows Mobile, but now also has the prospect of the Google phone. On the other hand, while RIM has always understood software and has done well with e-mail, it is not known for its browsers.

Of course, this is a very US-centric view. For Europe, I expect browsers to be important too, but the smartphone market is much less fragmented than the US and much of the market can be reached by writing a native S60 application. Meanwhile, in Japan, the mobile Internet (as Jeff Funk as noted) is whatever DoCoMo says it is.

Does Windows need another browser?

This week is Apple’s annual developer conference. It used to be in San Jose (an easy trip from where I live now) but Steve Jobs prefers The City, so he switched the annual conference from San Jose in April/May to a small corner of Moscone Center in June. The first SF conference (2003) was my last WWDC — I went to most of the WWDC conferences from 1988-2003, and still have many of the old polo shirts.

Today in San Francisco Steve Jobs did his annual WWDC keynote. Tom Krazit of CNET has a good stream of consciousness blog from WWDC. After the expected OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) demos, the keynote (as reported by Krazit) took an unexpected turn:

11:09--Safari: The Safari Web browser's got about 5 percent market share across the Internet, Jobs says. He'd like to make that number grow. How to make that happen? A version of Safari for Windows.

11:11--Safari 3 runs on Windows XP and Vista, and it exists today. Steve says Safari's HTML performance is twice as fast as IE using a benchmark Ina and I didn't catch. It's also faster than IE on Javascript performance, Jobs says, and it also beats Firefox (although not as much).

11:13--Jobs switches over to a Windows XP window. "This is strange," he jokes. He demonstrates the Windows Safari browsing through various sites, showing off a new tabbing feature. The benchmark we didn't catch is called iBench, and Jobs does a side-by-side comparison of Safari and IE 7 loading a bunch of Web sites. Safari's twice as fast, as you might expect during a WWDC demo. Try it yourself, he says.

11:15--Distribution is the next topic. There are over 500 million downloads of iTunes for Windows out there. Apple's going to have 3 editions of Safari, one that's for Leopard, one for XP, and one for Windows on Tiger. It's a public beta available today on Apple's Web site.

I must say, I didn’t see this one coming: I thought the browser wars were over almost a decade ago. However, in researching her update of IE and Mozilla plans, Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet’s excellent Microsoft blogger) found that Mozilla saw this coming.

Why did they do it? Here are some possible reasons:

• This causes the open source WebKit library for rendering HTML to be more widely used. Webkit is already available on the Nokia/Symbia S60 platform, while Swift is a struggling effort to bring WebKit to Windows. Raising the Safari/WebKit market share would mean more sites would care about Safari/WebKit compatibility. (For those who want to do first-hand research, the WebKit team is having a drinking party tonight in San Francisco.)
• As the TV ads make clear, the iPhone’s success is highly dependent upon Safari and a user experience comparable to a desktop. So maybe building Safari market share and compatibility has now become crucial.
• Windows-only shops can test for Safari compatibility without buying a Mac.
• As Foley suggested, maybe there are some Safari/iTunes integration opportunities.
• Many of Apple’s recent switchers are still running Windows, either at work or at home. So perhaps Apple is trying to give them a clean, consistent user experience rather than have them rely on Firefox (since IE for Mac is gone).

Still, running a Vista shop within Apple just to push Safari seems like a lot of expense; Microsoft has a whole Macintosh division, and they no longer maintain IE. There’s got to be another explanation; perhaps the iTunes for Windows programmers had time on their hands in between updates.

The key note ended a half hour ago. For those who want the new Safari (Mac or Windows), Apple’s download site is now active.

Photo credit: James Martin/CNET News.com

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