Still watching the Google Chrome Team Livestream. Google is on a massive release streak that clarifies their strategic outlook for the next two years. In two days we’ve had: Android 2.3 and a short Android 3.0 sneak-peek, the eBook store, (V8) Crankshaft, Chrome Webstore and Chrome OS.

The Store.

With the Chrome Web store, Google is attempting to replicate the AppStore model on the Web. From the point of view of a Web user, I find it useless, or in other words a glorified bookmarking system, coupled with a payment processing system and proprietary functionality that ties everything to Google; most of the things that the Chrome Web store offers are already here, although they are not offered by a single company. Payments, for example, take place all the time through trusted third-party payment processors, including Google. Discovery of new sites/apps happens daily through social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, a number of trusted publications, word of mouth etc. There’s no doubt that a web site/application directory, or a fancier way to ‘bookmark’ web apps might be useful, but that would be a much more noble proposition to what Google talked about today and it would need to be done in a cross-browser way that would be inclusive to other browser developers and the community as a whole.

The apps. The Web. Openness and Google.

The NY Times Chrome application is just a modern website I visited while the presentation was taking place. Amazon’s WindowShop is a Flash client for their store. A flash game could reside behind a third-party game portal. None of those things have anything to do with the ‘Store’.

The Chrome ‘Webstore’ makes things ‘easier’ and more streamlined for Chrome users and developers, but flies in the face of the openness and independence of the Web. It introduces a new dependency, Google Chrome for its proprietary functionality and Google, for its payment processing services and at the same time raises barriers to entry to other browsers that might very well be standards compliant, but lacking the ‘Web store’ functionality. It ties web applications, their users and developers to Google, even if that’s in the form of the additional work that developers will have to do to provide versions of their applications for the Chrome Web store, the ‘Web’ or even other ‘Stores’, if and when they appear.

There’s no need for any new ‘dependencies’, no need for web apps making use of ‘proprietary’ functionality found in any one browser; we’ve had that nightmare with IE for many years late in the 20th century and for several years the web was the domain of IE.

Google’s intention with the Web store, however, is not at all limited to the Web. It might be that the reasons for the Webstore’s existence fail to convince, but the company’s desire clearly goes far beyond that: Google aims to provide a single place for Applications that fits their upcoming Chrome OS strategy, which, by extension, aims to centralise everything in their own data centres.
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