Google's web browser Chrome has been growing in the last year and is now used by 5-7 % of Internet users (in the ballpark were I thought Chrome would be by now). Chrome hasn't gotten as many headlines as Google's mobile operating system Android, but Chrome is likely more important to Google's revenue and profit in the next 18 months.
By controlling the browser, Google makes sure it is the default search engine for users. By having its own web browser, Google doesn't have to pay Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari) or Opera to be the default search engine and makes it impossible for Microsoft to buy a part of the market.
In addition by building a faster browser and thus forcing all browser makers to speed up especially JavaScript rendering, Google is putting browser-based applications in a fundamentally stronger competitive situation to native Windows and MacOSX applications. And anything that can undermine Microsoft's profits from Office and Windows is seen as a good thing by Google.
2 comments:
"By having its own web browser, Google doesn't have to pay Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari) or Opera to be the default search engine and makes it impossible for Microsoft to buy a part of the market."
This doesn't make sense to me. If Google stopped paying Apple and Microsoft started, why shouldn't Safari use Bing as the standard search engine just because Chrome is around?
On one hand, one could of course argue that Apple wouldn't want to lose Safari users by using a inferior default search engine. But then again, that situation is hardly changed because of Chrome's 5% diffusion. If Safari switched to Bing, they could just as easily lose users to a Firefox that keeps using Google as they could lose them to Chrome.
Marcus: Thx for the comment. You're completely right. Google still has to pay Apple, Opera and Mozilla to be in their browsers, but it doesn't have to pay for the people using Chrome (and that is likely going to be 10-15 % by the end of the year).
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