Google's Chrome-Grown Win

(MoneyWatch)  Google's Chrome browser is gaining market share and quickly emerging as one of its most important assets in the battle to control the Web browsing experience. It should come as no surprise that the Chrome browser has taken a chunk of market share away from rival Microsoft's Internet Explorer (not to mention Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari); like compounding and other accruals that depend on the passage of time, this is an outcome that's been in the works for months. Chrome has absolutely zoomed past Opera and is closing fast on Firefox. ZDNet's Andrew Nusca notes:

At its current pace, Chrome will replace Safari as the No. 3 browser in less than a year.

It's no coincidence that Google decided to open this front in its battle with Microsoft -- Microsoft itself well understood the importance of the Web browser, crushing Netscape and everything else in its path in order to establish its products on every desktop and its brand as the portal to every conceivable application an end-user would need.

Google's aim is essentially the same as Microsoft's was in the 1990s, but the world is vastly different. Because it's operating in a wide-open Web environment, competitors could come from anywhere. But for the time being, the news will only get better for Google. It will now enjoy the benefit of an alliance with Sony, maker of the very popular Vaio line of laptops, and since Google says it has other similar deals lined up for its Chrome operating system, we can safely assume it will win more deals for the browser as well.

Google goes to great pains to explain, a little disingenuously, that its only strategy is to get more users on the Web more often. As its CEO, Eric Schmidt, told the Wall Street Journal:

We benefit when people spend more of their life online... So for us it's a very straightforward strategic initiative that ultimately results in more revenue.

That may be sop to investors concerned about Google management squandering resources on non-core business, but the truth is that Google wants to control as much of the user's experience as possible.

Google is now lining up:

• The verb formerly known as "search;"
• Chrome operating system;
• Chrome browser;
• Google online applications;
• Google Voice; and
• currently in developer preview, the Google Wave collaboration application.

Other than search, the most strategically important of those products are Wave for enterprise users and the Chrome browser for broad adoption.

For enterprise customers, Wave is the ultimate argument for switching from the Microsoft stack because it's one thing Microsoft absolutely, positively doesn't have and -- probably never will. A fully transparent, Web-native application for communicating and sharing documents instantaneously, it's finally something from Google that isn't "almost as good as Microsoft but cheaper/free."

But unlike enterprises, individuals are mercurial and easily churned. There's nothing to stop a user from deciding to make Bing his or her default search engine. While Chrome doesn't change that calculation, it's one more element that Google can use to surround customers and, ultimately, find new ways of extracting cash from them.