"I'm not sure Google's new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it's a useful milestone in marking Google's evolution towards becoming an older company with a distinctly different culture than they used to have....
Is Google evil? It doesn't matter. They've reached the point of corporate ambition and changing corporate culture that means they're going to be perceived as if they are. Whether they're able to truly internalize that lesson, accept it, and act accordingly will determine if they're able to extend their dominance in the years to come."
Worth pondering, as is his 2007 post about Google's difficulty with Theory of Mind. A fancy term for the kind of understanding which tells you that closing your eyes doesn't turn you invisible (except against the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, of course...).
Dash is missing the differences between Google and other business cultures (particularly Microsoft's), especially in the Theory of Mind post:
Microsoft is a command and control culture. That's how it became successful, back when the commanding eye and mind were Bill's. What it does well is focus: I saw the IE project that was launched to beat back Netscape from fairly close, and it was hella impressive. Its weakness is lethargy and a tendency toward creeping incrementalism based on strategic advantage, rather than flights of innovation. The results there speak for themselves.
Microsoft is also a product culture. it got rich putting things in boxes and doing point releases. It still acts that way, even though the physical channel is long gone. Conversely it has done poorly in services, where the ante is continual operation and improvement. That model has had a lot of trouble competing for mindshare and people with the long established product culture. The results are again self-explanatory.
Google was deliberately built as a (partially) chaotic and evolutionary culture. If you hand over 20% of their time to the engineering rank and file, you're making a bet that innovation will come from there, not some formal 'labs' organization. Google has never had the 'box' mentality - their bias is towards 'continual beta' rather than declaring something good enough. Its strengths and weaknesses are the flip side of Microsoft. It has a lot of trouble focusing. Case in point are the number of botched acquisitions (blogger comes to mind) where the strategic fit was impeccable, but the encysted entity was never adopted by the local culture, and ended up wasted. On the other hand, Google does produce the flights of innovation that elude Microsoft (and it has the core cash flow to sustain them). I take it as a very good sign that Google is using the recession as an opportunity to 'reap' some of the less successful ones - an evolutionary system needs a downside.
It's a fascinating struggle to watch - like a positional chess grandmaster versus a postmodern upstart, or two different styles of Go play. Expecting the companies to behave similarly, or measuring them by any common rule but market success is fruitless.
Chrome OS is itself another in a series of moves by Google meant to be sure that it never loses and always grows contact with the end user market, and (in effect) to neutralize any organized resistance to that contact. Hence support for 'net neutrality', and the creation of Android, Chrome and now finally Chrome OS - aimed at respectively the broadband carriers, wireless carriers and device makers, and Microsoft. While it's all done for the sake of Google's internal goodness, we are all going to benefit because these initiatives (and Linux, and Firefox, and ...) reduce these other parties' ability to collect monopoly rents, either directly or in the form of constraints on service terms and conditions.
Sharp observations. Thanks, as always.