There is a lot of news lately with Google. What is the Google brand? Is it a Search engine? Advertising network? Free online services? A browser? Has Google now become an Operating System?

Google announced their Chrome OS to be released in 2010. Initially, it will be installed on light-weight portable NetBooks. Google Chrome OS is followed after the Chrome Browser.

Google’s primary business is search and advertising. To do so they have to get a lot of eyeballs. That is why they created the Chrome Browser. What is the point of having another browser? Well, first, the look and feel is very stripped down. Secondly and most importantly, it has true multi-threading for each tab. If a webpage you visit crashes due to a plugin, it doesn’t crash the entire browser and all your other tabs since each tab is running its own process. This is important as cloud computing becomes more and more popular. It is no different than if you are running an application on Windows XP or Mac OSX and it crashes. It should not crash your other programs as well. Once HTML 5 becomes a full standard, web applications will have just as much power as client programs and thus require stability.

The threat Google faces is competition from other companies like Microsoft. If Microsoft has another monopoly over NetBooks, they could theoretically ship a lite version of Windows with only a limited set of programs without Google. Google is playing chess and foresees this years ahead and is positioning itself to be THE online platform which it has been dominating with Gmail, Google Docs, Search, and AdSense. If a company can control the operating system or browser platform, it can be culturally significant for the future.

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