Jason Kottke’s intriguing review of the current status of the Web-as-platform question (are Web apps now good enough to threaten the primacy of a certain desktop operating system monopoly? will they ever be?) is only the latest in a long line of musings on this theme that stretch all the way back to Netscape’s heyday. The dream of rendering individual users’ choice of desktop operating system irrelevant by getting them to move all their significant work into the browser was what fueled all those death-march development cycles during the browser wars.
Microsoft cut off Netscape’s air supply — with plenty of help from its victim’s own asphyxiating mistakes — before the browser company could complete building all the parts of this new computing world. Java was supposed to be an alternate road to the same destination; it turned out to be good for some other things, but not for that.
So we lost a few years there.
More recently, the Web-app universe has come roaring back, as GMail, GoogleMaps, Flickr and other Ajax-based Web interfaces have provided users with something speedier and more interesting than the old, slow, click-and-wait world of Web computing. It is possible, today, to begin moving more and more of one’s work and data into browser-accessible stores and programs. This is all great, and it’s unfolding with a kind of inevitability.
For a while there, during the downturn years, it seemed like the Web-based future might arrive without any one company driving it. The new structure of our technology would simply be built by a swarm of lilliputian enterprises that would gradually overwhelm the Gulliver of Redmond.
Suddenly, though, it looks like we’re back in the land of corporate showdown. In a wave of media reports, Google is being cast as the new Netscape — reluctantly, to be sure, since Netscape showed how dangerous it is to say to a company with an effectively bottomless warchest, “Bring it on!” Rather prematurely, I think, a lot of people quoted by Gary Rivlin in this morning’s Times suggest that Google is already the new Microsoft — that the company with the “don’t be evil” motto has morphed into a new evil empire.
Wherever you place Google on this spectrum, there’s no other way to read Google’s latest moves than as part of a broad effort to bring users onto Google’s platform so that, one day, they can be moved off Microsoft’s. That day is doubtless far off. But not unimaginable.
Google’s decision to raise $4 billion more on Wall Street, timed almost certainly not coincidentally to coincide with its release of two new software products (a new desktop application and a new “Google Talk” IM and voice communicator), reinforces the message first sent by GMail: that, when Google defines its mission as “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” “the world’s information” very much includes your own personal information.
Which leads us to the paradox here. There is one little weakness in the theory that Google is setting out to challenge Microsoft. For some reason, each time Google releases any software that is not browser-based — whether it’s Google Desktop, or Picasa, or the new Google Talk — it has offered only a Windows version of the product. No Mac versions, no Linux versions.
Maybe Google feels that the Mac already offers a rich software environment for geeks (with good desktop search already built into the latest OSX) and Linux isn’t a big enough desktop market. Maybe they just target Windows because, to paraphrase the old bank-robber line, “that’s where the users are.” Or maybe they’re targeting Windows users precisely because they want to woo Microsoft addicts on their own turf.
No doubt, it would take a lot of extra work to release editions of Google software for non-Windows platforms. Cross-platform development is enormously difficult: that’s a fact of software life. (Browser-based software is so attractive because you don’t have to worry about writing different versions for different operating systems; the browser makers have already done that heavy lifting for you.) I always understood this intellectually, but now, after several years of following the work over at OSAF for my book, I feel it in my bones.
But Google has assembled a vast reserve of computer-science horsepower. It is, if Rivlin’s story is to be believed, sucking Silicon Valley’s software brains dry. Surely, with all that coding prowess, Google could set aside some cycles to offer non-Windows users equal access to the cool toys it is providing. If the Googleplexniks are serious about that phrase “the world’s information,” they need to look beyond the realm of Windows. The world doesn’t stop where the “Start” menu ends.
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