On the face of it, there's nothing for Google in the browser market. There is no browser market. IE is clunky and has a history of security trouble; Mozilla's making inroads for those reasons and because there's a sizeable distrust -- in some cases loathing -- of Microsoft. But it's not easy to build a business case for dabbling in those waters.
Nevertheless, Google is up to something. Its strengths are data management, Web applications, targeted advertising and brand, and its most pressing need is to lock users in. It may well be the world's favourite search engine but if someone else comes along tomorrow with a better way, then we'll switch overnight. We're fickle that way.
What Google must do is get itself on the desktop. The obvious Google-shaped hole is local searching, where Microsoft has a history of conspicuous failure. A browser plug-in that amalgamated general file management with knowledge of Outlook, multimedia data types and online searching would be tempting indeed. Add extra features such as integrated email, instant messaging, automated backup to a remote storage facility and so on, and it gets very interesting. That would need considerable browser smarts, but would extend the Google brand right into the heart of the unconquered desktop where it would stick like glue.
By effectively combining local computing and the Web in this way Google would open up multiple revenue models. As well as advertising-supported and subscription services, it could start to offer very effective antivirus and other security functions -- your data, safe in their hands -- as well as any number of cleverly targeted sales opportunities based on what it knows about your personal file mix.
It would also remove one of the big barriers that stops people moving from Windows to open source. If all your important data has been painlessly stored on Google's farm and there's a neat, powerful Java browser-based management tool to retrieve it, you can skip from OS to OS without breaking into a sweat.
That's a lot of supposition from a handful of hires, but one thing's for sure. Google isn't building a browser. It has far bigger ambitions than that.
Talkback
Quite true, the way I see it, it's likely to go quite a bit beyond. While Gmail and 'Growser!' are obvious, as rightly pointed out in your article they also have built considerable strengths in file systems and data management and a massively distributed one at that.
They have not been shy of hinting at a local search capability which has pushed MS and Apple into a catch-up race.
Put that stew into the hands of some very bright and passionate nerds they have been hiring and I see the vapors of a 'GOS' emerging from that almost mystical cauldron we call Google.
Wouldn’t we love to have an operating system which links the world within our desktop to the www. Sure there would be issues, security and the like, but those would be welcome and very manageable challenges probably already on the drawing boards at Googleplex.
You could also expect them to be smart enough not to fall into the Monopoly trap and find themselves all tied up from inside like MS.
So while we would enjoy the G Operating System for free (very very likely), those two kids would deploy the GRID and rake in the big bucks form the corporates, Govt and R&D. Unless of course it goes to their head before that and (to quote KFN) he who fights the monsters becomes a monster himself.
Deja vu!
Remember AltaVista Personal Search?
I used it for about a year before it was ditched. Each night a scheduled task would index all the new documents on my machine. To find any document or email on my machine, I called up a search page in a browser and entered a few keywords. Blam! I always found what I was looking for.
This would be a fabulous idea for Google.
They should keep in mind that Windows is trying to do something similar with WinFS (a searchable file system).