“If you build it they will come”, erm not always.
Google built Chrome and a lot of people dropped everything and anointed Google king of the browsers.
I liked the idea of Google building a browser, it gave them a tremendous starting point and laid the foundation for cloud computing through Google Docs. So a couple of months after launch how’s chrome doing? Less then 1% market share.
Now the battle is a marathon and not a sprint and with the risk of eating my words, I don’t think Google will get more then 5% market share in the next couple of years – tops. The reason I believe this is the other browsers have way better user acquisition and retention strategies. Firefox has gotten where they’ve gotten (almost 20% market share) after years and years of community evangelism and add ons built for the browser. People are committed to Firefox for different reasons and switching costs for switching from FF to Chrome are fairly high. Internet Explorer and Safari have great distribution through hardware and operating systems. Safari will probably grow as iPhone adoption grows. And people who are using IE probably use it because it comes with their windows PC and their happy with that basic browser it meets their basic browsing needs.
So what will happen with Chrome? I believe there are four types of Google products, 1 – the kick ass products with kick ass revenue models (Search), 2 – the kick ass products where they’re working diligently on revenue models (Mail, YouTube, iGoogle), 3 – the pretty good products that they don’t really invest a lot in but are good for geeks and people who love the web (Reader), and 4 – the not so great products that they may or may not pull the plug on (like how they recently killed lively). I see Google Chrome as either a type 2 or type 3 product. If they launch a new version have ad ons for different utilities and sites in the next year then I’ll say it’s a type 2 product, if not I think it’s fate is limited to a type 3 product. I don’t think it will get the plug pulled like Lively has, cause unlike Lively at least Googlers are using Chrome.
