Google pokes a sharp stick in Microsoft’s eye

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You may have seen the news that Google is launching its own (open source) browser, codenamed Chrome. According to the company blog,

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

In reality, this takes us back to the original threat/promise of Netscape — the thing that threatened Microsoft so much that it set out to destroy Netscape. This was the idea that the browser was destined to become the key piece of software — almost an operating system in its own right.

Google Chrome takes up that idea, and holds out the promise of making it a reality. As Nick Carr puts it, Chrome

promises a similar leap in the capacity of the cloud to run applications speedily, securely, and simultaneously. Indeed, it is the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages. It takes the browser’s file-tab metaphor, a metaphor reflecting the old idea of the web as a collection of pages, and repurposes it for application multitasking. Chrome is the first cloud browser.

See the exposition in Google’s Comic Book for an outline of the thinking that went into Chrome. It’s basically the first multi-threaded browser.

This is an important strategic move by Google. To quote Carr again,

Google is motivated by something much larger than its congenital hatred of Microsoft. It knows that its future, both as a business and as an idea (and Google’s always been both), hinges on the continued rapid expansion of the usefulness of the Internet, which in turn hinges on the continued rapid expansion of the capabilities of web apps, which in turn hinges on rapid improvements in the workings of web browsers.

To Google, the browser has become a weak link in the cloud system – the needle’s eye through which the outputs of the company’s massive data centers usually have to pass to reach the user – and as a result the browser has to be rethought, revamped, retooled, modernized…

I’ve no doubt that this development will be presented in the mainstream media as Google’s “attempt to capture the browser market”. That would be a misconception IMHO. By making Chrome open source Google is ensuring that any browser that seeks to stay competitive has to take up the multi-threading idea. Which will make cloud computing even more pervasive. Which will further increase Google’s importance. As a strategy, it’s fiendishly clever.

And just in case the folks in Cupertino are sniggering, this is a harbinger of things to come on the mobile phone front too. Google has sussed that the (closed) iPhone will be difficult to beat, so its attack is based on an open platform (Android). Smart.

Many thanks to Gerard for the original link (even though he hates the Comic Book!)

LATER: I can’t run Chrome because the first beta release only runs under Windows Vista (if you please), but TechCrunch has been using it and likes it a lot.

STILL LATER: Kate Greene has a useful overview in Tech Review. And the Register published a perceptive piece by Tim Anderson.

Breaking with convention(s)

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I thought I was unshockable, but the news that there were 15,000 accredited journalists at the DNC took me aback. It leads one to ask: where’s the value they add? The answer is: nowhere. This was brought home very forcibly when I was able to watch Bill Clinton’s entire speech on YouTube — and then compare it with the little soundbitten excerpts relayed by the mainstream TV channels. Now that I can see this stuff for myself, I don’t need media folks on extravagant per diems to ‘interpret’ it for me.

Jeff Jarvis feels the same and has written a great column on the subject. Sample:

Nothing happens at the conventions. They are carefully staged spin theatre. The only reason for all these journalists to travel to Denver and St Paul is ego. They feel important for being there and their publications feel important for sending them. But their bylines matter little to readers.

We simply don’t need all their coverage of the conventions. Thanks to the internet anyone, anywhere, can read the best coverage of the top few news organisations. On Google News you’ll find thousands of articles devoted to the same stories, most telling us little we didn’t know or couldn’t have guessed. Go to YouTube or network sites and you can watch the speeches yourself.

Footnote: in the 1980s I covered some of the UK Party Conferences and observed, with astonishment, the size of the media contingent. The BBC, for example, usually sent about 120 people. And, in those days, most of the Corporation’s senior executives came down for a day or two to “sniff the air”, as it were (and stay in the most expensive hotels). It was ludicrous even then but conceivably could be justified because it was the only way of transmitting the proceedings to the public. But those days are gone.

Help the Aged

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I first became interested in economics through reading John Kenneth Galbraith, one of whose great insights was that the strongest advocates of state aid in hard times were the big corporations who, in good times, were the strongest opponents of ‘big government’. Well, here we go again.

A leading General Motors executive has called for government loans of up to $50bn to help American car markers build more fuel-efficient cars.

Bob Lutz, GM’s vice-chairman, warned that major US car manufacturers need the money to re-tool their factories and are unlikely to be able to raise enough capital alone due to tight credit markets.

Mr Lutz’s comments come against background of ongoing talks between leading US car makers and politicians in recent weeks over enhanced government backing to enable a shift to greener production.

The three major US car manufacturers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, are working with the United Automobile Workers union to lobby Congress for a further $3.75bn on top of the $25bn in loans authorised for the industry last year…

This is the crowd who’ve been gleefully making and marketing SUVs — and investing accordingly — instead of paying attention to the looming crisis in oil costs and global warming.

Back from the dead

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This morning’s Observer column…

Premature obituaries have their uses. It is said that when Alfred Nobel, the Swedish arms dealer, read an obituary which described him as a ‘merchant of death’ he was moved to endow the Nobel Prizes as a way of laundering his image. They also provide opportunities for setting up jokes, as when Mark Twain observed that ‘the report of my death was an exaggeration’, or when the Daily Telegraph published an obit of folk singer Dave Swarbrick after he’d been admitted to a Midlands hospital with a chest infection. ‘It’s not the first time,’ Swarbrick observed, ‘that I’ve died in Coventry.’

What are we to make, then, of the obituary of Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial CEO, which was inadvertently released by Bloomberg News last week?

Crisis in the Valley?

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Judy Estrin has a new book coming out. She gave an interview to the New York Times…

Ms. Estrin said that the United States is stifling innovation by failing to take risks in sectors from academia to government to venture capital. “I’m not generally an alarmist, but I am really, really concerned about this country,” she said.

In her book, Ms. Estrin discusses everything from problems in elementary education to drug development, but her expertise is in information technology. Beginning in 1981, she co-founded three tech companies: Bridge Communications, Network Computing Devices and Precept Software. In 1998, Cisco acquired Precept and appointed her chief technology officer. She left in 2000 and co-founded Packet Design. She is now chief executive of JLABS.

Ms. Estrin traces Silicon Valley’s troubles to the tech boom. She said that’s when entrepreneurs and venture capitalists started focusing more on starting companies to turn around and sell them and less on building successful companies for the long term.

“Starting in 1998, there was such a shift in Silicon Valley toward chasing money and short-term returns,” she said.

Part of the reason, she said, was that Cisco and other fast-growing big companies started acquiring start-ups with innovative technologies instead of developing new ideas internally. Entrepreneurs began founding companies with the goal of selling to a big tech company, and venture investors encouraged that.

Rhetoric and mastery: Bill Clinton at the DNC

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I’ve heard Clinton speak before (and was impressed by him) but this was a truly masterful effort. It reminded me of Aristotle’s identification of the three elements of rhetoric: what is said; who is saying it; and the occasion on which it is being said. Clinton’s speech worked on all three levels.

Or, as Dave Winer (who was there) put it:

No doubt Bill Clinton knows how to get people to work for him, he was good enough to get elected President twice, and over the years his skill has matured. But I didn’t expect the tour de force I saw last night. It was the best political speech I’ve ever seen, he hit all the points, his gestures, his timing, his facial expressions were artfully perfect. There was something for everyone, and despite what the Republicans are saying, he charmed everyone in the hall, and probably most of the people watching on TV. If you didn’t see the speech, you owe it to yourself to seek it out on the Democrats website. In the realm of politics this was a Sistine Chapel, a Mona Lisa, a Statue of Liberty.

There were so many good lines, but the one that made me laugh the loudest was when the crowd quieted down afterr chanting Yes We Can, Yes We Can, Clinton paused and began his next paragraph as if it all had been scripted (maybe it was) Yes He Can, and then talked about Obama and what a great President he will be. Everyone was happy to hear him praise the younger Future President, such graciousness begets much love in return, the way he did it, it sort of chokes you up. (Makes you wonder what the convention would have been like if Hillary had won.)

For me, the best line was when he said (with an elegance of phrase that reminded me of JFK), “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”

Dave Winer concluded:

So Bill Clinton now occupies a position that no one else has occupied in the age of television and the Internet, the powerfully charming super-statesman, two-term ex-president, still young, unlike Reagan, with many years to go before retiring. A far cry from the lout who campaigned so aggressively and unfairly, and reminded us that lurking inside that statesman’s body is a child who, when he loses control, can be very dangerous to himself and the rest of us.

Right on.

What’s been amazing about this presidential election is the amount of raw energy it reveals in the American system. I cannot imagine a single British politican capable of engaging at this level with ideas and passion. And it makes one depressed to think of what lies in store for us over here as the political conference season approaches.

On this day…

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… in 1963, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a great speech, but one rarely heard nowadays in full. TV usually shows only the “I have a dream” clip. So here’s the full version.

Nice coincidence too that last night a black man was unanimously endorsed as the Democratic candidate for President.

Worm makes it into orbit

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Now this is something you couldn’t make up…

NASA has confirmed that laptops brought aboard the ISS in July are infected with the Gammima.AG worm, adding quickly that the affected machines have no mission-critical duties and are used by the astronauts mainly to run nutritional programs and send e-mail. Officials suspect the worm thumbed a ride on a crew member’s thumb drive and found a fertile breeding ground on the laptops, which apparently have no anti-virus defenses (!). Luckily, the nature of this particular infection posed no serious threat in this environment — Gammima tries to steal the login information for a variety of online games, most popular in Far East, and attempts to send the data to a central server. NASA and its ISS partners are finally planning new security measures to prevent such occurrences — I say finally because NASA revealed it had let previous computer infections aboard the ISS slide by as “nuisances.”