Search titan, Google, is reportedly beginning to suffer from corporate sclerosis, with talent that helped grow the search engine into a Silicon Valley behemoth leaving for other startups and potential competitor Facebook, according to a report in the New York Times (“Google Grows, and Seeks to Retain Nimble Minds,” 11/29/2010). The theme is that innovation – the lifeblood of Silicon Valley – is being stifled by the growth of corporate layering and bureaucracy that seems to inevitably accompany epic corporate growth.
“Corporate sclerosis is a problem for all companies as they grow,” notes the New York Times technology reporter, Clair Cane Miller. “But a hardening of the bureaucracy and a slower pace of work is even more perceptible in Silicon Valley, where companies grow at Internet speed and pride themselves on constant innovation — and where the most talented people are often those with the most entrepreneurial drive.”
Yet, in another recent New York Times featured article (“For Google, the Browser Does it All,” 11/25/2010), Ms. Cain Miller outlines how Google is poised to compete directly with both Microsoft and Apple with its Chrome OS, a freeware operating system in beta testing that is poised to push Google beyond its role as the world’s leading search engine and into a new stratosphere as a one-stop tech-provider. The move is one of many designed to wean the search engine giant from its reliance on pay-per-click and organic search result advertising revenue.
Corporate sclerosis be damned, the effort to transform Chrome from just another web browser into an operating system designed to run the next generation of netbooks fully equipped for ‘cloud computing’ is exciting. It seems, Google intends Chrome to do for PC netbooks what Android has done for mobile technology.
The Chrome operating system is engineered so that the vast bulk of files on a notebook will be stored “in the cloud” – or, perhaps more precisely – at one of the huge ‘data farms’ that Google, along with Microsoft, Amazon and others are busily building. “In Google’s vision of a world where all computers run on its Chrome OS,” Ms. Cain Miller writes, “anyone can walk up to any computer with an Internet connection and gain access to all their information.”
Google’s vision for the future may be closer (and more powerful) than many people realize, as it is expected to release a third-party manufactured netbook running on Chrome OS at the end of this year.
“Google has high hopes for Chrome,” Ms. Cain Miller notes, “and as the company weathers criticism for relying too much on search advertising for revenue, its executives have been describing Chrome as one of Google’s new businesses with huge potential.”
If, as expected, Chrome OS is the platform that will finally allow Google to compete toe-to-toe with its archrivals Microsoft and Apple, the engineers and others who are deserting the purportedly ‘sclerotic’ Google may prove to have been caught ‘off-footed’ in soccer parlance
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