Google Chrome Conversion

The web browser is one of the most important applications that can be installed on a PC these days. Whereas the OS is the window to your device, the browser has become your window to the world. By its nature this application tends to be really difficult to move away from as familiarity, bundling, and shortcuts have made it all too easy to become captive to one browser or another. Or so I thought…..

The Background

I have used IE since back in the times of Netscape Navigator, I started using it because it was a free bundle and I normally look rather kindly on Microsoft products as they work the way I want them to. I was very happy with IE for quite a while, and then Firefox came out.

Now Firefox had some advantages, and about this time IE seemed to be suffering a little bit. Its performance for me, as well as its reliability to “just work” the way I wanted it to became a sore point. So I downloaded Firefox and started the trial run on it. What I found was a more disruptive experience, especially when there was ever a need for Flash installation or some other Applet. I couldn’t understand why I needed all these other downloads that just seemed to get taken care of on the backend with IE.

In the end I abandoned Firefox as the added complexity, inexplicable lack of it just working as I wanted it to, and minimal benefits drove me back to IE.

About 10 months ago I started using IE 8 on Windows 7. While I had felt IE 7 was a pretty solid product IE 8 seemed to turn back the clock and I noticed a huge drop-off in loading pages and performance, especially when I opened new tabs. The frustration to watch IE hang as I just went to check another tab was unbearable but somehow I tolerated it.

A Funny Thing Happened

Now without a company laptop, there came a need to go out and purchase a new machine as just having a desktop would not suffice. I purchased a new ASUS low-end notebook and have been very happy with it. Last night a friend who still works at Microsoft decided to help me setup some applications as he was horrified I hadn’t wiped all the preinstall garbage yet.

It was during his installation raid on my laptop that he took the opportunity to drop in Google’s Chrome browser. This was an option I had not even considered because as a consumer I’ve been frustrated in the past over Google’s business model being based around securing and selling my private information (aggregated or not).

The seeds were planted though; an invading product had made it to the shores of the once high walled castle that has held me as a captive audience and customer for at least 10 years.

Crossing the Moat

There were already cracks in the wall with my relationship with Internet Explorer. Performance was questionable, security some said laughable, but there had also been major fortifications in the IE 8 browser with some of its new features.

As it turns out though bridging the gap between the two products in my fickle heart was 1 small feature, one feature that’s so simple, that is so much a part of so many Microsoft products I cannot believe how it was ever overlooked.

And that feature, was a spell-checker in the browser.

Now just a few weeks ago I told a friend just how laughable Google Docs. was for the simple fact it didn’t even have the little squiggly line that appears under a misspelled word in my gmail account. How could they possibly compete when they can’t even tackle probably the most critical product in the Office Suite in Outlook?

Now I know the answer is that they didn’t include spell-check in any one of the programs because they included it at the browser level, so that it could be useful in many more areas than just the base application.

Is Spell-Checker a Game Changer?

There are many other features we could discuss, both positive and negative, for IE and Chrome; in the end I think this one feature is enough to really cause a shift in market-share.

People have become so used to the spell-check to cover for their laziness, poor education, haste, confusion, and absent mindedness that it is something no one can go without anymore. It is likely in the top 10 features used in Word, and Outlook.

What’s more, it has become a hassle now to have to write all of your text in Word or Outlook hit spell-check and copy it into the site you are using. Web 2.0 is where this feature is most sorely needed. Do you leave comments on a blog? Do you have Facebook, LinkedIn or any other number of social networking sites? Do you want your friends questioning your intelligence when you misspell simple words? Well guess what if you answered yes to the above questions, and no to the last question then you’re a Google Chrome customer period.

A Measured Response

Its amazing seeing the silo nature of a company work against it in this way. There needs to be an immediate response to add in the same functionality to IE 8 as is currently available in Office. Without this I don’t see how Microsoft can stay the dominate player in this space especially with the rise of social networking, and more of our lives and regular communications moving into the cloud.

Conclusion

It took 1 day of use, and 1 feature to convince me to abandon my previous browser of choice that had kept me captive for so long. Seeing this kind of innovation I am forced to rethink some of my positions on Google. For while their business model is abrasive to me, and while they haven’t shown much in the way of converting opportunities to dollars in businesses outside of their core model; they have shown me how to unseat a dominate player by just building a better product.