Invinciblebrain.com

Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft’s Vice President of Developer and Platform Evangelism, has gone on record to say that “most of what Google does is defensive.” He has an interesting point: all of the non-search stuff that Google invests in keep its would-be competitors on their toes, and prevent those would-be competitors from encroaching upon the cash cow of Google’s operation: search.

I observed that Google’s not in the operating system business, so Chrome OS isn’t expected to be their bread-and-butter. It’s expected to be one mechanism to allow their bread to continue to be buttered by making the online experience better for the casual user. The less barriers there are to an enjoyable online experience, the more of a market Google can enjoy. All the fancy offline features of various Google products are ancillary benefits to a small segment of their userbase: the bulk of Google services and applications are intended to be used and enjoyed online. I’d wager that Google would be happy to drop Chrome OS development if Microsoft Windows presented a demonstrably superior online experience.

Abu-Hadba recognizes that Chrome OS isn’t a direct threat to Microsoft’s cash cows, the Windows and Office product lines. Chrome OS may eventually be one part of a larger paradigm shift, and it may even be a major part of that shift, but it’s important to remember that this does not represent a significant change in Google’s strategy. They’re not abandoning their core services to become an operating system developer, any more than Microsoft is abandoning their core offerings to become a search provider.
The thing that interests me vis-à-vis Google and Microsoft is the manner in which each pursues these secondary, and in some cases tertiary, events.