Google OS Coming Out of Beta

Google’s Chrome Web browser is really an operating system in disguise. Google’s ambition is to build an ecosystem that uses Chrome and Google Gears in a world of HTML and javascript. The key to Google building critical mass behind this effort will be to get broad and pervasive distribution of the Chrome browser. To do this they are going to need to pre-install it on OEM machines. Google is finding out that no OEM on the planet will ship anything that is still in beta. Last time I checked Gmail is still in beta after 4 years.

Google’s Chrome Web browser (aka Google OS) is coming out of beta testing according to a TechCrunch report. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of user experience, told TechCruch’s Michael Arrington that it would be coming out of beta soon but no date was given.

Google’s strategy with Chrome is puzzling in many ways. Firefox is an open source Web browser with just over 20% market share world wide. Google is a big financial contributor to the Mozilla organization that builds Firefox. Yet Google takes an approach that makes them start at a base of zero and directly compete with one of their biggest partners. More fragmentation will make it far more difficult to galvanize the developer community around a platform. Google will have a long uphill battle to fight on this one.

Interview with Mark Zuckerberg

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, recently interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They talked about a variety of topics, but there were a couple things that were interesting. Facebook has but a lot of investment behind its platform and it recently launched its Facebook Connect service which we wrote about. Zuckerberg talks about the ways he views first party applications verses third party applications.

Zuckerberg says, “There’s this big question about whether we’ll compete with applications. The approach that we take isn’t that there’s some rule that we won’t compete with applications, but we just think that in general it’s not good for us to.”

What he is really saying is I will build first party applications when it’s in Facebook’s best interest. Anything that is really, really important to the community will be strategic to Facebook. Like music, Zuckerberg goes on to confirm that Facebook is working on a music application. Read more

Qi Lu is Microsoft’s Chosen One

Microsoft announced today that Qi Lu will join the company as the President of Online Services Group. Steve Ballmer tapped Lu to oversee all efforts in search, advertising, and online information and communcations.  Qi comes to Microsoft after 10 years at Yahoo, where he most recently served as executive vice president of engineering for all Yahoo’s search and advertising development efforts. He has a dotorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon and holds over 20 U.S. patents.

There was a lot of speculation on who Microsoft would hire for this top position. Lu is an interesting choice because he has fundmentally been an R&D guy. About coming to Microsoft, Lu says “I am genuinely excited about the opportunities ahead for Microsoft to make an enormous impact on the online industry.”  Here is the email Ballmer sent to employees following the announcement. Read more

Google Three Hours From Antitrust Case

Sanford Litvack, the hired gun for DOJ, was just three hours from filing the formal antitrust compliant against Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). In an interview with The AM Law Daily, Litvack says, “We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day. We told them and three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement.”

The never-filed government complaint would have charged that the agreement violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. Litvack went on to say, “It would have ended up also alleging that Google had a monopoly and that [the advertising pact] would have furthered their monopoly.” Litvack clearly wanted this to happen, “Of course I was looking forward to it,” he says. “We felt pretty good about it, we felt pretty confident.” 

Google certainly avoided a near disaster but it was foolish from the very beginning to even pursue the deal. When you have over 70% market share in the search business, you already have monopolistic network effects that will make it nearly impossible for anyone to compete with you. Why bother locking up an extra 20% and awaking the sleeping giant, the DOJ.

Google Dances Around Cutting Back

Google (GOOG) has been dancing around cutting back on spending and projects with no future revenue opportunity for a long time. But it seems like the are finally changing their tune. With all the economic carnage happening on Wall Street it seems prudent that some things would change at Google. WSJ quoted Google CEO Eric Schmidt, saying “Projects that haven’t really caught on” and “aren’t really that exciting.”  are not going to get prioritized for resources. He went on to explain that Google wants to “prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.”

This is coupled with a string of news that Google is cutting back in other ways from reducing the 10K contractors working for Google to curtailing lavish perks like abundant food for employees. I also heard from people inside Google that they are being asked to create budgets for the first time. It looks like the world is coming to a end and Google has to stop partying like its 1999.

Twitter Dead or Bought in 2009

Evan Williams, the god father of blogging, has really lost touch with reality. Tonight at the Churchhill Club in San Francisco he scoffed at criticisms that his company Twitter doesn’t have a business model. Rafe Needleman was there to quote Evan saying, “We will make money, and I can’t say exactly how because… we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.” As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

Does he realize its not 1999 or even 2003 when he sold Blogger to Google? Has he turned on CNBC to look at the economic carnage that is happening? Companies that have no business model like Twitter will soon be joining the deadpool or they will be begging Google or Microsoft to buy them. According to Techcrunch, Twitter has around 1 million vistors per month to their Web site and only 200K active users. That is about the size of the whole technorati population in San Francisco. Peanuts, compared to a service that is really mainstream. Twitter is really just a feature in a broader product offering. If Microsoft, Google, or Facebook come out with a similar offering Twitter is a dead man walking.

There is No Money in iPhone Apps

Apple has created the new shareware marketplace with iPhone Apps. In August Steve Jobs was standing on his soap box and beating his chest because he claimed sales of iPhone Apps hit $30 million in the first 30 days. Jobs claimed that iPhone apps would be a billion dollar business.

Now 10K apps later the #1 “paid” app on iTunes is Koi Pond. This is a joke. Gizmodo gives an entire breakdown of the apps by category. The iPhone app marketplace has really blossomed into a freeware marketplace. The only really successful apps that will be high volume will be free. There is no money in building small little consumer apps.

The only reason Apple got 10K people to build apps was the hope it would lead to getting users. iPhone will create a concentrated set of users using a common platform. But similar to Facebook apps no one really looks at Facebook as a real application platform. It’s just a way to get access to a 120 million people that are all socially connected. And the only reason established companies will build apps is to stay relevant to iPhone users.

Developers are also constrained by Apple’s closed system approach. Similar to Chinese capitalism it looks and smells like a open marketplace but its not really open. I can’t wait until 2009 where Pong will be the #1 “paid” iPhone app.

Windows Live Gets Makeover and Goes Social

Microsoft is starting to roll out Windows Live wave 3 . It got a new paint job and lots of upgrades. The changes in many ways are a lot of catch up work but there is some promising work being done.

Some of the interesting work comes in the Profile page which shows all of your activities on Windows Live as well as other Web services like Twitter, Flickr, and Yelp.

Microsoft is obviously betting that all the fragmentation in social networks will make aggregation the killer social app. Bringing all your social feeds into one place coupled with 450 million Windows Live users might be a compelling value proposition and strategy. With Facebook embracing “openness” with Facebook Connect this might play right into Microsoft’s strategy.

The Windows Live Photo app has a pretty cool slide show feature that uses Silverlight to change the background color to match the dominant color in each photo, similar to the Philips Ambilight TVs. Microsoft also boosted the storage limit of its online file storage service, SkyDrive, from 5GB to 25GB.

Facebook Connect the New “Hailstorm”

Facebook is starting to stir up some noise around their Facebook Connect service. The New York Times said within a few weeks a number of prominent Web sites including Digg, Hulu, and CBS properties would weave Facebook Connect into their sites.

This is a lot like circa 2001 when Microsoft launch “Hailstorm”, a set of XML Web services that were going to give people more control over their personal information regardless of device or platfofm. “Hailstorm” later launched as a set of .Net services that were part of the Microsoft Passport service. It even launched with prominent Web sites like eBay and Expedia adopting it. Many of the people working at Facebook were probably enjoying college too much to remember. Facebook Connect is nothing more than “Hailstorm” connected to someone’s social graph.

Blockbuster and Microsoft Building Live Mesh App

Blockbuster and Microsoft are working on an application that uses the Live Mesh technology to deliver video content on any device. This is probably similar to the BBC application that Microsoft showed off at PDC, which was very impresive. The interesting thing that Live Mesh solves for developers is a way to easily deploy and manage an application accross a variety of devices. 

Dallas News spoke with Keith Morrow of Blockbuster, which said “Eventually, we’ll give customers instant access to any movie on any device with an Internet connection and a screen.” Using Silverlight and Live Mesh, I think Blockbuster and Microsoft can build a compelling application.

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