Google Chrome - Now Part of the Data-Ownership Play

By Steve McMains

Google has entered into browser war with its launch of Google Chrome - the open source browser from Google. Though there had been lots of rumors in the market about Google developing a browser but they guarded it almost as a top secret project. And on the other hand they started supporting Mozilla's Firefox - the open source Browser. (However, there is good news for Mozilla - Google will be supporting Firefox till 2011.)

Do you remember the browser war of 1990s? At that point of time Eric Schmidt was the CTO of Sun Microsystems. Later in 2001 he joined Google and was immediately approached by Larry and Sergey Page about developing a Google Browser. However, Eric put it down on the ground saying that Google was not yet ready to get into the Browser war.

As soon as Chrome was launched (along with the great chrome comic book that was developed primarily for bloggers and journalists to provide an overview), the whole blogosphere and webmaster's forums got busy talking about it.

More interestingly, webmasters got busy to understand the user data sharing options in Chrome and how Google could be taking advantage from the browser. One big reason for webmasters being suspicious about Google Chrome and user data extraction is Google's advertisement network and its history (webmasters and bloggers had been too vocal to make Google delete and disclose user data and privacy issues). Concerns among webmasters about data sharing became such a prime concern that Matt Cutts (the unofficial Google Spokesperson and Google engineer) had to step in and reply in his blog about different data aspects of Chrome.

However, Chrome has a good feature to go to incognito mode if the user do not want share any private data with the website he or she is browsing or with third party. And this feature is somewhat similar to Microsoft's IE8.

This in turn, put the online advertisers into a lot of dilemma as these developments can restrict them to capture valuable data about the target audience to offer more targeted ads for a better ROI. As Dave Morgan, former AOL executive and Tacoda (advertisement network) founder commented in a famous advertising magazine "this is a data-ownership play". Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, believes that they (both Google and Microsoft) are "doing it for the right reasons" to establish a middle ground regarding user data privacy.

Anyways, Google had to do it. Google still holds the maximum share of the online search industry. But, people need to use a browser to get into Google. Now, when Google has launched the browser, it is one step closer to developing its complete solution on the web industry.

Google has already captured around 2% of browser market. However, there is another aspect that Google must consider. General users get IE by default when they install Windows in their computer. And the 2% mainly consists of web savvy group. What is Google planning to capture general people? Is there another operating system in the card?

Steve is a media professional and writes for different online publications on media and advertising industry. For more information on the story he recommends you to visit the online marketing magazine - http://www.adweek.com

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