
09-02-2008
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Chrome: What Google Said, What Google Meant
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Jack Flack is normally quite suspicious when a supposedly accidental leak leads to wide, mostly positive coverage. Particularly about a new product. And particularly on public holiday that ensures little competitive news on the business pages the next day.
But the Google leak felt like a genuine miscue, detected only because Kara Swisher's Weber apparently has a 3G card.
What makes it seem like a genuine mistake? Well, while the company moved quickly to confirm the reports, it was not prepared to make the new browser downloadable, thus squandering the full benefit of the coverage.
The launch confirms that the war for the supremacy in the next tech era is fully on. Just as Microsoft cannot afford to have Google operate virtually uncontested in search, nor can Google afford to have Microsoft operate virtually uncontested in browers.
Here's the parse.
Google: At Google, we have a saying: "launch early and iterate."
Translation: Outside Google, it's sometimes misheard as "launch early and dominate."
Google: While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well!
Translation: Heh, heh, heh. Even our mailroom guys are go-getters.
Google: As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome.
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