The Google empire has been built on the foundation of recreating existing products in a more innovative way. The unrivalled success of Google Search and Gmail were based on the innovation and expansion of features such as relevant search results and email storage space respectively, setting them aside from already established competitors.
Just three and a half months after the launch of the beta version of Chrome, Google’s answer to Internet Explorer and Firefox, Google has launched Chrome 1.0. A beta version is part of software’s release life cycle where the product is on pre-release to selected users for testing purposes and then updated based on the results. Compared with Gmail’s 2004 release which is still in Beta version, Chrome 1.0 has spent very little time under testing.
With the closure of Lively set for the end of the year and the limited success of Orkut and Jaiku, the former being Google’s social networking site and the latter their Twitter-esque realtime messaging utility, some industry commentators are suggesting this latest rush release might be a knee-jerk reaction. After the closure of Lively, Google stated that they were focussing on their core business of search, advertisement and applications however their aforementioned track record has caused some to doubt their capability for innovating in the field of applications.
This adds ambiguity to the unprecedentedly fast release of their application Chrome 1.0 however this can be accounted for by the fact that Google no longer wishes consumers to go through other browser applications such as Microsoft or Mozzila to access their core business. This motivation for an early release could potentially affect the reliability of Chrome 1.0 as the bug tracking feature is reported to show 2400 ‘open issues’. Chrome 1.0 lands in the centre of the ongoing battle of the browsers which sparks many debates in offices across the globe.
The long established Internet Explorer from Microsoft and Mozilla’s add-on friendly Firefox browsers are fighting the battle for popularity, each offering pros and cons which is gradually splitting industry professionals in two. Although IE browsers still have a significant lead in general usage, W3schools reports that traffic to their site from IE7 and IE6 combined accounted for 46.6% of all browser usage in November 2008, where Firefox sits at a respectable 44.2%. Chrome only accounted for 3.1% of usage during the same period so the question has to be asked, what innovations is Chrome offering above and beyond its highly evolved competitors?
Google claim that Chrome delivers speed, stability and security. Based on the feedback from users regarding management of bookmarks and the speed of standard plug-ins, changes have been made that has representatives of the Google camp confident that Chrome can evolve to become a main player in the browser market. No-one can deny that they have the advertising capabilities to get the product noticed however only time will tell if they have made significant innovations to reduce the considerable deficit between Chrome 1.0 and the two main players in the browser market.
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