RSSCan you trust Chromium?
I mentioned recently in my posts on Google’s new Chromium operating system project that while the idea of a lightweight, secure, powerful web-oriented operating system may be theirs at the moment, they may not ultimately be the business that finds success with such a product. This isn’t the first time I have hedged my bets when discussing Google efforts, particularly those oriented toward commercial enterprises; I have a similar hesitancy in crowning Apps, or Postini, as clear successors to the disputed throne of SaaS offerings in their respective categories because, fundamentally, I don’t believe Google cares about that market or those products. Google is a media company, and ads are their bread and butter. By most conventional business logic, it would actually be somewhat silly for them to focus on anything else to the extent necessary to guarantee success. Nor does the company appear to do so; they are taking another, perhaps more rational, approach, one that involves throwing a lot of stuff out at the wall and seeing what sticks.
This is a fine strategy for a business that can afford it, but a poor recommendation to potential customers. And conveniently, the company has handed out a good example of why they may well fail with Chromium right on the heels of announcing its expected release next year.
That example involves one of the stop-gap measure that Google and others have been coming up with to make our existing, old and busted, browser technology suffice in the new SaaS age, Google Gears. Gears is a browser plug in that allows web-based applications to store some information locally in order to function, in at least some capacity, when the computer in question is without an Internet connection. It is one of the primary answers to the powerful argument rolled out repeatedly by SaaS detractors that you can’t count on anything on the other end of a wire; only local apps will function reliably. Gears was designed to put lie to that, and in some measure it succeeded, allowing Apps documents and Gmail to work even in the absence of a network connection.
With Chromium on the horizon and the new HTML5 specification likely to obviate the need for such kludges, Google has rather abruptly determined that Gears needn’t be kept up to date with modern client operating systems: with Apple’s recent release of Snow Leopard, including its 64-bit Safari browser, the company simply sniffed.
Snow Leopard and Safari 4 introduced some changes which are incompatible with Gears. Apple made these changes to improve the security of their OS and of Safari. While we continue to talk to Apple about the issue there is no workaround for us at this time.
But although they are trying to flop the blame onto Apple, the fact is that Google’s own long-delayed Chrome browser for OS X will not support Gears, and it appears (I haven’t tested this; YMMV) that a workaround patch is so trivial that a third-party developer managed to knock it out in a couple of months.
It’s certainly understandable, and even inevitable, that technology companies will move forward to new horizons and stop supporting older technologies as they become obsolete. But to fail to provide a trivial workaround to bridge a year-long functionality gap tells you exactly where Google’s priorities are with respect to enterprise support. Who is going to risk that they will make a similar decision with another product, be it Chromium or anything else?
So, I stand by my belief that a dedicated web-app OS will be successful; but I reiterate my belief that Chromium may well not be it.
