Javaun’s Ramblings

I’ve now had a full 24 hours to play with Chrome and my initial reaction has only been reinforced: game-changing. Like others, I’ve noticed a few quirks — Chrome is temperamental in Facebook, for example — but otherwise it’s fast, clean, intuitive. I won’t abandon Firefox because of all the plugins I use (and frankly I want to continue to support Mozilla). But especially for complex applications such as mail and web analytics, I’ve never seen them run faster or more smoothly than on Chrome.

In all the reading I’ve done since Sunday, I hadn’t seen this NPR story on Chrome. We cover tech stories that have general newsworthiness; sometimes this means that we speak to public officials or pundits rather than the tech visionaries who can break things down. In this case though, we actually interviewed an analyst (don’t ask me what I think of analysts) *

We quote Sheri McLeash (and misspell her name) of Forrester as saying that the general web user is going to stick with what they know (i.e. MSIE)

“The general user population uses what they’re comfortable with and what they know,” says Sheri McLeash, an analyst with Forrester Research. “If you look at the e-mail example, most people keep e-mail accounts that they’ve had for years because they’re familiar with it.”

I’m calling BS on Sheri’s creds as an analyst. (15 years of publishing experience? Come on…)

She and many others are missing the boat on this one. That’s like saying on the launch of the iPod, “well, people really don’t want iPods. They want Walkman Cassette players, because people want what they know…”

It’s not about grabbing browser share (thought that may happen), it’s about upping the ante significantly. It’s about owning the cloud, and Google just wrote the next gen browser and the most powerful JS VM to date (they’re claiming benchmarks of 10x Mozilla/Tamarin and over 50x MSIE 7). They’re making the next generation of web apps possible. People stick with what they know when nothing revolutionary is happening. They don’t always know what they want until the see it.  This new browser is like someone just walked up to a bunch of cavemen playing with stone tools and not only did they throw them a few iron tools, they even gave them a couple of blacksmiths….

I liked this Wired piece, Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web.

 * Javaun’s general take on industry “analysts”: they are people often outside an industry, often without direct work experience in the area of coverage, whose job is to explain something complex to neophytes. If they were superstars in their area of coverage, they’d be entrepreneurs — not analysts.