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Merging the browser and OS has been attempted so often, I'd hesitate to say that Google was smarter than all of us. It's probably more that they had the most l

by oddity 6y ago

Merging the browser and OS has been attempted so often, I'd hesitate to say that Google was smarter than all of us. It's probably more that they had the most leverage and motive to be to be successful. To me, the interesting development was that we as an industry rushed to native (ObjC) on iOS so quickly once it was available only to later return to web technologies with Electron and friends, but there were reasonable technical arguments for that at the time so it's hard for me to say that anyone was an idiot. Web technologies in the 00s were... not good.

tpmx 6y ago
The bigger picture is: Google hired lots of these web standards people.. who then just went nuts in creating so many web standards/apis/complexity. In retrospect I would guess they were probably meeting KPIs. So, to the plan to dominate the web was there already around 2007-2008 or or so, all while hiring lot and lots of very talented C++ developers (probably like 3k of them working on chrome by now, I haven't kept up the past five years). Together they built the monopoly/duopoly that is called Chrome. It's built on open standards, but enforced by an ever growing complexity.
- oddity 6y ago
  For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wanted to lock people into their existing platforms. Arguably, Google's move was a response to the threat of native lock in. Once they started, it was easier to execute on than smaller web-centric companies because they had the unique privilege of advertizing the Google Browser on... Google. That web technologies actually became wildly popular for native-style apps probably owes more to the diversification of platforms and difficulty of writing native apps for all of them, otherwise it would have become yet another platform that no one writes apps for. I don't know if Google could or did predict that.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    The biggest, strongest, insurmountablest advantage Google had over MS, Apple, Sun, Nokia, Oracle, Adobe and everybody else is that they didn't need to sell anything, hardware or software. They just needed a platform for selling ads. Any platform would do, so long as it would catch on and no ad competitor controlled it.

by oddity 6y ago

tpmx 6y ago

The bigger picture is: Google hired lots of these web standards people.. who then just went nuts in creating so many web standards/apis/complexity. In retrospect I would guess they were probably meeting KPIs. So, to the plan to dominate the web was there already around 2007-2008 or or so, all while hiring lot and lots of very talented C++ developers (probably like 3k of them working on chrome by now, I haven't kept up the past five years). Together they built the monopoly/duopoly that is called Chrome. It's built on open standards, but enforced by an ever growing complexity.

oddity 6y ago
For sure. My objection is that I think that move was more obvious for Google than it was for, say, Microsoft or Apple, who still had a native-mindset and wanted to lock people into their existing platforms. Arguably, Google's move was a response to the threat of native lock in. Once they started, it was easier to execute on than smaller web-centric companies because they had the unique privilege of advertizing the Google Browser on... Google. That web technologies actually became wildly popular for native-style apps probably owes more to the diversification of platforms and difficulty of writing native apps for all of them, otherwise it would have become yet another platform that no one writes apps for. I don't know if Google could or did predict that.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  The biggest, strongest, insurmountablest advantage Google had over MS, Apple, Sun, Nokia, Oracle, Adobe and everybody else is that they didn't need to sell anything, hardware or software. They just needed a platform for selling ads. Any platform would do, so long as it would catch on and no ad competitor controlled it.