Also, while I see and accept your point about trying to drive the browser market along with Chrome, I had to chuckle at the reaction to this picture someone from Microsoft would have to this thought.

Lastly, it’s an interesting concept for a third party entity to try to drive product development at another company from the outside. Do you have an example of a situation where something like this was successfully accomplished by an entity other than the government? (Governments accomplish this, for example, by funding basic reseach that can be implemented in commercial products.) And, if Google is really trying to drive Microsoft’s actions from the outside, doesn’t that make it so powerful as to be “scary”. (Thankfully, they “do no evil”.)

First, from your comment I think that you DO agree with me that browsers in general pose a disruptive threat to the traditional OS.

Second, I agree with you that Chrome is not really novel in a technological sense. It represents only an incremental improvement in certain dimensions of browser functionality.

However, remember that Christensen’s full concept of disruptive innovation isn’t about technology at all. It’s about the things that come along and displace incumbents. You are absolutely correct that the browser has long been recognized as that kind of disruptive threat to the OS.

The problem is that, for all their progress and nifty features, the major browsers do not have the capability to handle advanced web-based applications very well for the reasons I mentioned in my post.

My argument is that Chrome may provide the impetus to push those capabilities into browsers that will finally tip the balance in favor the browser as the preferred application platform.

As the owner of a web-based software development firm (http://www.knowligent.com), I can assure you that the current crop of browsers really aren’t powerful enough for the kind of web-based applications that could effectively compete with traditional OS-based applications. Google wants to build those apps (and so do we and a lot of other companies), and they are tired of waiting for the major browsers to “grow-up”.

I doubt that Chrome will prove to be disruptive to the browser “market”, and I don’t think it will, by itself, be directly disruptive to anything else. My argument is that it is likely going to lead to the faster evolution of browsers in general in ultimately making them disruptive to the traditional OS/Application paradigm.

I think of Chrome as part of a category of products (web browsers) that are disruptive to another category (OS’s). That’s what disruptive innovation really means, and I believe that Chrome is going to accelerate that process.

The definition of disruption from http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology:

“Disruptive technology (or disruptive innovation) is a term proposed by Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology. This is contrasted with sustaining technology, which is viewed as incrementally improving or evolving technology.”

Based on this definition, Chrome is more of a sustaining technology that is trying to improve the existing browser technology that exists today.

Does Microsoft have to worry about the new model of delivering applications on a browser instead of an OS? Absolutely. They have been worrying about this for a number of years now. The advent of Chrome does not change this.