A lot of people are focusing on the Microsoft / Google battle that’s coming up with the impending and recently announced launch of Chrome OS. I’m tempted to rant about how irritating it is that they chose to line it up with the Chrome browser name (I wrote several editorials when Chrome launched berating bloggers for making the AOL-user level mistake of conflating OS with Browser).

I may still write that post at some point, but I think that it’s more interesting to try to theorize why this is happening, because it’ll give us a better idea of the product roadmap and the strategies that’ll be used by Google to compete in the OS market.

 
Google is a company that is, by all measures, the largest fish in the pond.  They are the goldfish that’s been dumped into the city lake and has grown as big as it can possibly grow. The only way for Google to grow larger is to grow the lake that contains them. This doesn’t mean gobbling up competing big fish, since the fight to do so would inevitably mean wasting energy that could be better spent on growth. Growing the actual size of the lake is the only way to get more room for growth, and when you’re a goldfish that size, it’s within your grasp to do so.

While the metaphor breaks down a little there (have you seen a goldfish actually make the lake bigger?), time and time again, I’ve heard this line of reasoning repeated over and over as the driving motivation behind a number of seemingly bizarre initiatives like Android, Chrome, OpenSocial, Google Reader, Google Voice and others. What Google chooses to put it’s energy into developing and promoting has the unstated goal of growing the pool of users who interact with the Internet, and thus interact with Google.

Put another way, as the Internet’s userbase grows, so does Google’s userbase.  When Google’s userbase grows, so will their revenue.

Is There Room to Grow?
Absolutely!  I was surprised to learn exactly how much room there is to grow when I was researching recently on broadband usage data.  I found broader statistics earlier this morning that talk about how much room to grow there is in the myriad of ways the Internet could be used.

Globally, according to Miniwatts Marketing Group, Internet penetration is only around 20%, and in North America, arguably one of the worlds most heavy Internet users, penetration is still only at around 46%, leaving more than half of the Americas unconnected to the Internet.

With almost 80% of the world left unconnected to the net, why would Google engage in an expensive battle to provide what is likely to be a free operating system and cheap hardware to ultimately unsatisfied and finicky Microsoft OS users?

No, as with Android, the real goal here is more towards competing with the OLPC than the iPhone.  Large swaths of the more well off peoples in first world nations have been brainwashed to fork over $500 at a time to use high end telephony, and Steve Jobs has hoodwinked those same people into plopping down $3000-5000 for the privilege of surfing Twitter on a laptop with a half-eaten Apple plastered on the side.

Why mess with that? They’re already  fully monetized Google eyeballs.

They’d much rather go after the eyeballs that Microsoft doesn’t want and the people that Steve Jobs’ followers have heard of at TED. Google, at it’s heart, is a libertarian organization when it comes to the economic theories they adhere to.  They believe the government should stay out of our business and introducing capitalism, transparency and access to new countries, societies and cultures will ultimately have positive effects (both for the company and the society).

This is their thinking, and this is why, even though it’s a less juicy story than the Goliath vs. Goliath thing everyone’s focused on, we should take great interest in Google’s OS play.