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Today it occurred to me, Google has taken a play directly from the Microsoft playbook. These days there is a prize fight being fought between Google and Apple for the heart and mind of smart phone users. Apple has a head start, but that doesn’t historically mean a whole lot.

A Brief History Lesson

Back in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. There had been home computers before, but the Macintosh was the first computer that anyone could just sit down and use. Before the Macintosh, computers were obtuse, they required knowledge of arcane commands and were accessed in a, and I am being nice here, less than approachable interface.

Apple came back from Xerox after seeing the mouse and graphical user interface and in perfect Steve Jobs form set out on perfecting it and making it as sexy as possible.

The problem that Apple has never managed to solve is that sexy is expensive. In 1990, 6 years after Apple had released the Macintosh with great success, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows that had a true graphical windowed environment and it was the first version of Windows that truly caught on with PC makers.

You can practically thank Windows 3.0 for the birth of several major computer manufacturers, namely Gateway, or Gateway 2000 if you are old enough to remember them then.

What Windows 3.0 managed to do was put a computer in your home, with roughly the same capabilities as a Macintosh, but at almost half of the price. Computers were still very expensive then compared to today. A Macintosh went for about $2,495 and a PC with Windows could be had for less than $1,500.

Isn’t This Article About Phones?

Oh yea, that’s right. So what does this have to do with phones? The Apple pundits will tell you “Price doesn’t mean much, you can get an iPhone on contract for $200 and they are selling light hot cakes. That’s true, but there is quite a long tail on that user acceptance curve and the real wealth of users are not yet holding smart phones.

As of 2010, ComScore says 45.5 million people in the United States own smartphones. The mobile phone market is comprised of 234 million subscribers. That’s just in the United States! That means all of the smartphone OS’s, and Palm, Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM are the biggies, are fighting for less than 20% of the available market. Are these numbers starting to sound familiar?

Today that means 80% of the market aren’t willing to pay for either the phone or the data plan. Google is already trying to figure out ways to subsidize the data plan with advertising, and you can already get Google Android based phones free on contract. This year Best Buy had an Android phone free with contract for every major carrier.

That means we aren’t too far from free Android phones with cheaper data plans. Once Apple has soaked up all of the tech savvy people with expendable income, Google or Microsoft (I hope!) can walk in and just sweep all the remaining people into customers. If you think this sounds crazy, it’s happened before.

It’s like déjà vu over here if you ask me. A “good enough” competitor, prices that attract the consumer at large, and a willingness to let anyone build on their platform to build devices that fit whatever the user wants.

I don’t know about you, but if I was Apple, I’d be looking in the rearview mirror. And in case you think the iPad is any different, read this article again and replace iPhone with iPad in your mind.

I just want to let this quote sink in. This is from one of Google’s engineers talking about their email system Gmail

"Gmail was a beta app for a while in itself and that kind of let us as a company not be too afraid about getting something out that may screw up once in a while."

Wow.

I am going to try something new. I have some Buckethead music glaring, a whole season of My Name is Earl just came in on DVD, and I have some spare cycles to burn. What does that mean for you? It means I am going to go through these instructions and try to install Chrome OS and give it a look see.

I have decided to do this as a quasi-live blog and give all of the appropriate comments and growing pains inline as I discover them. Enjoy!

Getting Started

4:00PM, Thursday, November 19th

My test platform is my trusty 17” Unibody Macbook Pro. It’s got a 2.8Ghz Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hard drive, Snow Leopard OS, and most importantly for this exercise, VMware Fusion 3.0.

The first part of the adventure is getting a platform to install it on. If you read my blog you are aware that I am a Fedora man when it comes to Linux. Unfortunately for me, Google seems to have a thing for Ubuntu, so I am downloading Ubuntu 9.10 from Ubuntu.com as my build platform. I’ll be installing it into a Virtual Machine on the Mac. (Unless there is something I don’t know about, I should be able to host the VM and share it when I am done, I’ll check on that.)

4:16PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ubuntu may be slow downloading (70%), but Buckethead is wailing. If you like guitar music and haven’t heard him, check out the album Giant Robot, right now the song “Want some Slaw?” This guy is too good, a shame he’s absolutely nuts. Oh, and even though we are talking about Google and Apple so far, you should get ZunePass from Microsoft and get your own Buckethead fix going!

4:26PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ubuntu is downloaded, I started the new Virtual Machine wizard, increased the default RAM from 512MB to 1.5GB, and started the install.

4:35PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ok, Ubuntu is installed. Let’s check all the prerequisites and make sure we can build this sucker. On a related note, that’s only 9 minutes to install. Considering that it’s a completely functional OS with productivity software, communication software and all the basic tools you need to function on the internet, that’s not too shabby. Once it reboots we’ll set a root password and update everything.

The list is pretty long, lucky for us they have a simple apt command that has all of them in one batch, run:

$ sudo apt-get install subversion pkg-config python perl g++ g++-multilib \
 bison flex gperf libnss3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnspr4-0d libasound2-dev \
 libnspr4-dev msttcorefonts libgconf2-dev libcairo2-dev libdbus-1-dev

That’s a lot of junk getting installed at once, but it only took about 5 minutes to complete.

Let’s Get Some Source Code!

4:49PM, Thursday, November 19th

Ok, Ubuntu is happy, now we need to download some code. I am choosing not to go the git route as I have no intention to change or check in code. I am downloading the tarball of the code and it clocks in at 232MB.

Started the compile, let’s see how long this thing takes to build.

5:31PM, Thursday, November 19th

Still building. It’s been going for almost an hour. I still have more building to do when this script finishes. Woohah..

5:46PM, Thursday, November 19th

Build finished, can’t seem to get the system to enter chroot so I can start the next part of the build process. Taking a break for some TERYAKI!!!

8:30PM, Thursday, November 19th

Well, I am chroot blocked. I can’t get this sucker to finish building. I am calling it a night on this front, but I’ll give it another shot tomorrow. Please leave suggestions in the comments if you have seen this symptom:

When I run the enter_chroot.sh script, it says it mounted chroot, then immediately unmounted chroot. Thoughts?

Stay tuned for more adventures installing Google Chrome OS

There was a time when I cold called software companies asking to try beta software. To date these events, the ones that accepted usually sent me their software on 3.5” floppy disks. It’s been quite awhile.

The internet made getting beta software a lot easier, downloading it is quick and painless, but it also came with a serious setback. The original concept of beta software was to get it in the hands of real users, let them test it, use their feedback and then incorporate it into the eventual shipping release.

The key differentiating factor was that no one in their right mind would use beta software in a production environment or as an application that held any sort of critical information.

The .com bubble burst this philosophy and sites of all kinds came out in beta and attracted millions of users. No offender of this was worse than Google and specifically Gmail.

Now Google will make the argument that they have finally left the beta phase that they stayed in for literally years, but recent mishaps of data security would leave one room to argue that there are still some major bugs in the works and using it for anything mission critical or with sensitive information is clearly a problem.

Google seems to be getting smarter by really clamping down on invites to new features like Google Voice and Google Wave, but my question still remains. Is the concept of Beta software too watered down now? Do users see it as potentially unstable software that should not be used to hold any information that is mission critical or sensitive in nature?

Thoughts?

Yet another article today. The EU is saying that it’s going to take another approach. Instead of fines, or forcing Microsoft to ship without Internet Explorer, they are going to try to force Microsoft to include other browsers in Windows. This means that most likely Firefox and Opera would ship inside Windows.

The EU is Picking Winners?

Forget for a second that I work for Microsoft and let us just look at this pragmatically. I have talked about this a lot, and I know it’s getting old, but we are very close to a complete reversal of roles and the EU using Microsoft’s supposed monopoly position to decide which browsers do and do not succeed. The concept of product tying, is what the EU is upset about. Windows the platform gives Internet Explorer an unfair advantage in the marketplace. I’ll get off my “who cares and who said business is fair” soap box for a minute and ask a logical question. If the EU chooses which browser would be included, are they not tying themselves?

Does The Customer Get Screwed?

Contrary to popular belief, there are other browsers than Opera and Firefox. Are they going to force Windows to ship with 25 browsers? Is your desktop going to look like circa 1999 Dell with 40 shortcuts on the desktop to different browsers? Is Microsoft going to be required to support these browsers? If so are they going to be compensated for having to support a competitor’s products? I can’t imagine calling Microsoft for a problem, only to be told that I had to call Mozilla for my issue.

Care to know what your support options are for Firefox? You can post something to a bulletin board, you can browse their knowledge base (probably not much help is your browser isn’t working properly) or you can download an IRC client and go into a big chat room and try and find help. I am afraid that to the average user, that isn’t support.

If you want more support than that from Opera, you are going to have to sign up for Premium Support and pay for it. See, that’s the problem with free software, it’s usually extremely poorly supported. Now you are asking Microsoft to take a product from an organization that wants nothing more than to see them fail, with little to no support, and ship it with their product. WHAT!?

Who Really Wins Here?

This whole situation is rife with conflict of interest, my biggest question is this: If they pull this off, is Microsoft allowed to change the default landing page and search engine for those browsers? If not… I mean…why not just force Microsoft to write Google a check. Let’s make it a tidy 20 billion or so.

Think about it for a second, it’s very obvious. The only way that Firefox makes money, is that Google pays them a referral fee for every search initiated through the search box or default home page of Firefox as it ships. That is other than the obvious huge payment they get for making Google’s search engine the default landing page.

Now, last time I checked, Google had a ridiculous advantage on all of the other search engines when it comes to Market Share. In 2007, and it’s increased since then, Google had 65% and the closest competitor was Yahoo with a shade over 20%. Microsoft was about 8.5%, Ask.com had around 3.5% and everyone else made up the rest. That means every other search engine on the internet combined for 3%.

It’s no secret that Yahoo is crumbling from within, and with an already declining market share, is likely to fall out of the running completely unless someone intervenes. The only problem is that they think to highly of their value and seem determined to fall apart than take an offer that isn’t well above actual value.

That leaves Microsoft, struggling to stay in a business that built Google into a multi-billion dollar behemoth seemingly over night. Microsoft is making some moves, most recently with bing.com appearing as the rebranding of live.com, but it’s no secret that being the bundled browser and search engine in Windows is the only thing keeping them at a still declining 8.5%.

So where is the monopoly here? If being in Windows is such a huge advantage, why is Google absolutely dominating this industry?

If the EU succeeds in this change, they will be further cementing one monopoly while trying to thwart another in an industry that they clearly are not the leader in.

The graph above is the one the EU will have you look at. 66% in favor of Internet Explorer for Browser market share. But the numbers that source the revenue don’t back it up. The obvious math would prove that the end users are either savvy enough to, or tricked into switching the default search engine for the operating system 80% of the time!

Google is not beyond striking deals that subtly switch your browser search provider when you install one of dozens of third party applications. Yahoo has pulled the same dirty move. These days any number of applications from little apps to ones as large as Adobe Acrobat.

The point is that shipping with the operating system doesn’t ensure a victory by any means.

The Dodge Ball Analogy

Imagine if you were a kid again, playing dodge ball in PE class. Before the game started, the coach came by and pulled the biggest kid aside and said “You see all of the smaller kids? You aren’t allowed to try to hit those guys.” Then, that same coach goes to all of the smaller kids, gives them two balls each and says, “You see that big kid over there? Everyone aim at him.” Then, to make things extra fair, announces to the class, “Every hit on the big kid counts as two, and every hit on a small kid counts as one half.”

I know, it’s extreme isn’t it? Or is it? And what kind of message does it send? We are already at a place where everyone gets a trophy. Kids are taught that you can get a black belt in a couple years at the age of 10, and that if you want something, all you have to do is keep complaining until you get your way.

The Mythical Monopoly Gauge

The sad truth is in the name of competition, competition is dying. Companies like Apple are benefiting from the restrictions being placed on their competitors by using the same (or worse in many cases) tactics that are the cause for many of these lawsuits. Don’t believe me? iTunes, the only media player that you can really use if you have an iPod or iPhone, default installs QuickTime with iTunes. OS X ships with Safari by default. iTunes tries it’s best to install Safari on your PC over and over, you have to diligently reject it every time there is an update.

These practices would be absolute cause of lawsuit for Microsoft, several of them already have been. These restrictions stifle and suffocate innovation at Microsoft.

So what is the lesson we learn here? It almost seems to me like the lesson is “Don’t get too big.” If you are small enough to avoid a target, then you can lie and cheat like everyone else and it’s ok.