In general, most New Year's resolutions tend to last as long as the NFL playoffs. But those who enter the year working for the world's most ambitious technology company won't have that luxury.
Google enters its 12th year as an information and financial powerhouse, holding claim to perhaps the most enviable position on the Internet and worming its way into all sorts of businesses that Internet companies have traditionally avoided. The company shows little sign of slowing down its innovation engine, but as a result of that pace faces competitive threats like never before from other giants of the technology and media worlds.
What should Google leaders Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page focus on in 2010? Here are five suggestions:
1. Don't forget where you came from
Search remains Google's cash machine. It ended the year with around 65 percent of the U.S. search market, according to ComScore, and does not appear to be losing any momentum. Microsoft's well-received reinvention of its search efforts in the form of Bing seems to have the main effect of taking business away from Yahoo, its pending search partner, rather than denting Google's advantage.
But the nature of search is changing as the nature of information produced for the Internet changes. Real-time results are now seen as important, and Google has much work to do in order to prove its real-time strategy unveiled in December will produce the same types of relevant results that its main search engine did in rising to the top. Social-networking sites are host to an enormous amount of relevant content that Google can't necessarily find.
Google does not face as many competitive threats in search at the moment as its antitrust defense lawyers would like you to believe. But that doesn't mean that it's not vulnerable to the same sort of scrappy start-up that it once was, operating under the radar with a fresh take on the world. As Schmidt well knows, having imposed a strategy of focusing 70 percent of Google's attention on search, keeping the gravy train running is job No. 1 at Google.
2. Get control of the engineers
This is undoubtedly a controversial notion inside of Google. But the tech history books are raft with giants that slowly grew arrogant and haughty with their success, from IBM to Microsoft. Google knows it needs to avoid traveling down a similar path while catering to an engineering culture that has almost never taken no for an answer.
Simply put, Google's engineers do things because they can. And at some point, that's no longer going to fly as Google enters more and more markets. That's because while much of Google's self-image revolves around avoiding evil, that mindset only applies to users of its products. It doesn't apply to competitors or partners, who have the ability to cry foul if they believe they are the victims of unfair competition (regardless of whether or not it's actually true).
If at some point the government deems Google to have a monopoly in search advertising, expect Google's march into other markets to slow. Engineers may scoff at such restraints, truly believing in the quality and usefulness of their work. But regulators are not engineers, and those folks might arguably hold more power over Google in 2010 than any other force.
3. Get HTML5 standards finalized
Much of Google's strategy for ushering computing into the 21st century revolves around the notion that the browser can be the dominant platform for applications. There are numerous benefits to this approach in theory; software can be much more lightweight and suitable to mobile devices if run over the Internet, malware can't knock out a personal computer that doesn't allow things to be installed locally, and, of course, users who spend their lives on the Internet are more likely to search for information.
But in order to make that vision happen without being labeled as a usurper, Google's representatives on the W3C Working Group for HTML5 must make sure that the various components of the HTML5 technologies are approved in concert with the community of other browser vendors, so that Google is not seen as having a distinct advantage. The company appears to take this very seriously, and the sooner the process can be brought to fruition, the easier it will be for projects like Chrome OS to develop without being seen as an attempt to corner the personal computing market.
4. Live up to the promise of Google Books
Perhaps the biggest albatross around Google's neck in 2009 was its settlement with authors and publishers over Google Book search, a process in which Google managed to turn lemonade into lemons. Its attempt to create a digital library for the ages was vehemently protested by authors, privacy advocates, and copyright experts angry over Google's scan-first ask-later approach to building that database.
Few doubt the value of an open digital library that unlocks access to books stored on musty shelves at exclusive universities. But many are distrustful of Google's intentions when it comes to Google Books, and putting their fears to bay could go a long way toward ending the acrimony over the settlement. A final hearing is scheduled for February, and while Google has already made concessions in response to criticism from the Department of Justice, lining up an independent partner to be a second source of this digital material would take the wind out of much of the opposition's argument.
5. Clarify your mobile strategy
We may get a sense of this one extremely soon, as Google is scheduled to host an Android event Tuesday that most believe will mark the debut of its first Android phone sold directly to the general public.
Google is walking a fine line at the moment, should it really intend to sell its own branded phone. One of the primary reasons that the iPhone took off was that Apple dictated the experience that iPhone users and developers would see, locking the hardware specs and controlling the distribution of software for the platform. Of course, that approach has all kinds of side effects, which appeared to be the primary motivation behind Android: a modern mobile software platform free of such restrictions and available to anyone who wants to make a phone.
However, Google's partners--even if they knew about the Nexus One months ago--are likely to be perplexed by its decision to make its own phone. Will Google developers reserve key Android features for Google devices? Will they cut back on their promotional resources for Open Handset Alliance partners in order to promote their own phone? And why should they trust Google in the future, given that the company has said numerous times that it had no interest in making its own phone?
The beauty of the mobile computing market is that it is truly up for grabs, and that no one company appears ready to dominate in the same manner that Microsoft came to own the PC. But Google will have crossed a line if it really does plan to sell its own phone: it will have leaned on the efforts of others to create a viable market for Android only to swoop in once the software has grown popular with a device of its own.
That means other companies could think twice about partnering with Google in the future.
The groups responsible for standardizing the language used to build Web sites have begun tackling technology to provide a direct interface to Webcams.
The World Wide Web Consortium has begun work on the HTML Device addition to the Hypertext Markup Language specification. "The device element represents a device selector, to allow the user to give the page access to a device, for example a video camera," according to a December 11 draft of the specification.
The move marks another step expansion of the scope of the Web standard. Advocates are trying to make it a foundation not just for static Web pages, but for interactive Web applications; the latter benefits from the direct access to hardware that applications running natively on a PC enjoy.
HTML is jointly overseen by two groups, the World Wide Web Consortium and the less formal WHATWG (the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) that branched for a long interlude when the W3C wasn't interested in HTML. Ian Hickson, a Google employee, is editor of the new HTML5 specification under development. The HTML Device specification, though is part of a broader HTML effort.
The WHATWG draft of the HTML Device specification has wider options, including interfaces to "a USB-connected media player" and an RS232 port, the latter an ancient standard, in computing-industry years, for serial communications.
But, the draft WHATWG specification cautions, "RS232 is only included below to give an idea of where we could go with this. Should we instead just make this only useful for audiovisual streams? Unless there are compelling reasons, we probably should not be this generic. So far, the reasons aren't that compelling."
After more than five years as a publicly available test version, Gmail shed its beta label in July. Now one feature key to the Net giant's cloud-computing aspirations, offline access to Gmail, also has grown up less than a year after its debut.
"Offline Gmail is graduating from Labs and becoming a regular part of Gmail," Google programmer Aaron Whyte announced the change Monday in a blog post.
Offline Gmail support, which relies on a Google browser plug-in called Gears, lets people read, search, organize, and compose e-mail even when there's no Net connection; sent messages are queued up in an outbox for delivery when the network access is restored and the account on the computer can resynchronize with the server.
"Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients--they're used to being able to access their mail whether or not they're online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser," Whyte said.
Google Apps, a bundle that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs suite of online applications, is available for free for educational users or smaller organizations. Premiere accounts cost $50 per person per year, and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called such enterprise-oriented services Google's "next big billion-dollar opportunity."
Gears is built into Google's Chrome browser, but other browsers rely on a plug-in. However, Google has stopped developing Gears in favor HTML5's equivalent features. That overhaul of the standard for displaying Web page includes local data storage on a computer as one feature, and it's now enabled by default in Chrome even though HTML5 isn't a final standard yet.
Updated 1:45 p.m. PST and 5:46 p.m. PST: For some Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, Gears doesn't work, hampering use of Offline Gmail.
Google initially said Tuesday that Gears doesn't work on Snow Leopard but later amended its statement, narrowing the problem to Apple's Safari browser.
"It turns out that Gears does work on Firefox for Snow Leopard and Leopard, though it still doesn't work on Safari," Google spokesperson Victoria Katsarou said. "There was a bug that was preventing Gears from downloading on Snow Leopard, but we're fixing it and at we'll be updating our Help Center article and Download page to reflect the change."
She declined to comment on when or even if an HTML5-based version of offline Gmail might arrive.Offline Gmail didn't even work Tuesday in the new Chrome for Mac beta version. Gears is built into Chrome, but trying to enable offline Gmail with the browser yields a "browser not supported" error message.
For the rest of you, here are Google's instructions for getting set up with offline Gmail:
1. Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.
2. Click the "Offline" tab.
3. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."
4. Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.
Some seeds for overhauling Web browser graphics were planted more than a decade ago, and Google believes now is the time for them to bear fruit.
The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.
New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.
"First they're ignored, then they're hyped, then they're written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.
Bitmap images, such as this part of Wikipedia's logo, don't scale gracefully to different sizes.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
SVG lets this Wikipedia logo be shown as many pixels wide as you'd like.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That's good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.
For one example, try the SVG version of the Wikipedia logo using the page-zoom tools in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera. It's a big SVG file, but it does scale. Another real-world example: the illustrations in Google Docs use SVG, Neuberg said.
But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, can't handle them. "It's hard to deploy this when you can't use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.
Google and various allies are working to change that--its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG--and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.
Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.
SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don't, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.
At the conference, Google plans to show the fruits of work with Wikipedia to use SVG Web. Actual deployment of the technology is still one or two months away, awaiting more testing.
One issue for SVG is that it's been part of the evolutionary dead end of Web programming, XHTML. But that's changing: the HTML5 standard under development right now explicitly makes room for SVG so it'll become a first-class citizen, Neuberg said.
There's another way of doing vector graphics in a browser, a standard called Canvas that's also part of HTML5. Canvas is best suited to drawing a shape on the screen that the computer then forgets about, whereas SVG is better when the shape will be manipulated because the computer keeps track of its elements and attributes, Neuberg said. For comparison, equivalents of the SVG and Canvas approaches both are available in Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.
Realistically, though, the bigger vector competitor today is Adobe's Flash, which is in widespread use already. And just to spice things up, there's Adobe's FXG, an SVG-based format for vector graphics within Flash.
An advantage of vector graphics in Web pages is that because they're constructed from text, search engines can see and index content, Neuberg said. For example, labels in an anatomy diagram, along with conditions and medical procedures, are relevant data that would be indexed--or for that matter translated with a service such as Google Translate.
"SVG, like HTML, can have hyperlinks coming in and going out," Neuberg said. "It's part of the Web. It integrates with other technologies, so it's not trapped in a box."
In a rare display of public goodwill between Google and Microsoft, the companies are bonding over Microsoft's decision to actively participate in the HTML 5 standards process.
In a post to the The WHATWG Blog spotted by Ars Technica, Google's Mark Pilgrim, the company's leading HTML 5 evangelist, thanked Microsoft's Adrian Bateman for joining the conversation over HTML 5 development several weeks ago. "On August 7, 2009, Adrian Bateman did what no man or woman had ever done before: he gave substantive feedback on the current editor's draft of HTML5 on behalf of Microsoft. His feedback was detailed and well-reasoned, and it spawned much discussion," Pilgrim wrote.
Despite its role as the developer of the most widely used browser in the world, Microsoft had been practically silent on the development of the HTML 5 standard until August, when Bateman weighed in on some potential choices for how various tags will be implemented in the standard. Since then, Bateman has endorsed the use of the <video> and <audio> tags in the standard, something that Google and other browser developers are very keen in including in the final standard.
HTML 5 is a big part of Google's agenda for the next several years with respect to its Chrome browser and Chrome OS project. Google executives have chided Microsoft for its slow embrace of the project, which would make all browsers more capable of running applications, but have acknowledged that Microsoft's road to HTML 5 is complicated by the fact that many businesses have built applications around the current version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and would be forced to modify or start over from scratch when the new standards are implemented.
"As you might expect, much of the discussion since August 7 has been driven by Microsoft's feedback. After five years of virtual silence, nobody wants to miss the opportunity to engage with a representative of the world's still-dominant browser," Pilgrim wrote.
Google and Microsoft, of course, are otherwise at each other's throats in the day-to-day competition to dominate the tech industry. There's a longstanding animosity between the CEOs of the two companies, and they are each attacking the other's backyard in hopes of defending their current dominant positions. Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing a worthy competitor to Google search, and Google has taken aim at Microsoft's dominant position in office productivity software while unveiling plans for its own lightweight operating system.
Google announced Tuesday that the third stable release of Chrome is ready for the world, a little over a year after its debut.
The stable version of Chrome 3.0 is much faster than its predecessors when it comes to JavaScript performance, according to Google.
(Credit: Google)Chrome releases evolve from developer previews to beta releases to stable ones, and the third version of Google's Web browser has now earned that coveted status. It's about 25 percent faster than the Chrome 2.0 stable version, and the new version (click here for download) also comes with a few tweaks.
Google redesigned the New Tab page with a click-and-drag mentality, added icons to the Omnibox to distinguish between searches, sites, and bookmarks when entering text in the address bar, and perhaps most significantly, added support for the video tag in the HTML 5 standard in a stable version of the browser.
Bringing HTML 5 technologies into Chrome is a huge part of Google's strategy for both the browser and Chrome OS, coming one day to a Netbook near you. The capabilities delivered by the video tag were a highlight of Google's presentation to developers at Google I/O in May: the tag allows Web developers to embed videos like they were photos, alleviating the need for plug-ins.
Let us know if you have any problems with the stable version of Chrome. Developer preview versions of Chrome 4.0 are well under way, but Google has yet to release a Mac version of the browser despite interest from luminaries such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Today's Web programmers face a big choice when it comes to fancier aspects of their sites: HTML or Flash? One start-up hopes it can bridge the gap with a technology called FluidHTML.
FluidHTML shows its technology to build Flash applications with HTML-style programming with this Pong demo.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The start-up, FHTML, announced software Monday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's intended to give HTML-style programmers the ability to use Flash features.
FluidHTML's language is an extension of HTML, the company said. "We borrow a lot of the really good ideas from HTML, because why wouldn't we?" said Chief Executive Michael Collette at the conference.
The approach holds some promise--but it also poses some risks. It may be complicated trying to get HTML and Flash programmers to work together, but at least those are established disciplines. FluidHTML requires a language known by neither set of coders right now, and the technology is supported just by a start-up still seeking its own programming staff and $1 million to $2 million in venture funding.
HTML, the traditional language of the Web, got its start showing just text and images with basic layouts. The second, begun by Macromedia and now led by Adobe Systems, is better suited for animations and flashy graphics, video, and increasingly, applications as well.
But a different set of programming skills are required to build Flash-powered sites or applications, so it doesn't always coexist easily on the same Web site. Programming is getting even more complicated as Flash converges with HTML and its companion, JavaScript.
FluidHTML relies on a Flash software module that programmers can embed in their Web pages. It interprets the HTML-esque code to supply Flash features such as vector graphics, sound, and video.
"The markup language supports very powerful commands (tags) and can do remarkable things that take enormous development effort in Flash," the company said. "FluidHTML RIAs (rich Internet applications) can be developed by less expensive programmers and require fewer man-hours to build than Flash."
Google has issued the first developer preview version of its Chrome browser to reach the version 4.x milestone, a phase that should bring some advanced features in the forthcoming HTML 5 specification for Web pages but that for now just sports a cloud-based bookmark synchronization tool.
Google's Chrome browser is getting a bookmark sync tool.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Account. Anytime you add or change a bookmark, your changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you've activated bookmark sync," programmer Tim Steele said in a blog post Monday. Steele introduced the Chrome bookmark feature less than three weeks ago.
I set up the bookmarks feature with no trouble on version 4.0.201.1 of Chrome for Windows; note that to get it to work, you must specifically enable it at launch by adding the "--enable-sync" option to the launch command. The wrench menu (think tools) offers the new menu item to synchronize bookmarks. Clicking on it springs open a dialog box that prompts you to log in with a Google account; doing so then sends the bookmarks to the server.
The Mac version of Chrome--which by the way now enables by default plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash and has grown much more stable--didn't yet support bookmark sync Monday night, so I couldn't test the actual synchronization itself on my present home setup.
Google doesn't draw much attention to version numbers, using them more as developer placeholders than beacons for marketing or support purposes. Google updates Chrome automatically, so users often get new versions without even knowing about it. But the new versions can indicate when the company is making significant changes behind the scenes.
... Read moreAfter leaving much of the creation of a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.
The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.
"As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor's draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. "I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."
HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.
... Read moreSo what, exactly, is Google planning to do with On2 Technologies' video software?
The search giant isn't saying. The planned $106.5 million transaction isn't going to make too much of a dent in Google's coffers, but the transaction comes during a hot debate about which future technologies will power Web video. CNET News' Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit pondered the implications of the deal, and here's what they thought:
Shankland: When I heard about the acquisition, I immediately wondered if the move could tidy up the mess that is that Web video or clutter it up even more.
On2 offers video compression technology that's used, among other notable places, in Adobe's Flash software and the Hulu video site. The company licenses various "codecs"--the software used to encode video so it's compact enough to squeeze down a narrow Internet pipe, then to expand it at the other end. It's a major technical challenge--one that's getting more important people to spend more time watching online video and more companies to attempt to profit from that.
Krazit: Well, it all depends on what they do with it, right? Google's being coy about this particular acquisition, but there really are only two reasons to do this: open-source the codec and throw a third wrench into the HTML 5 video tag standards debate, or bake it into existing technologies like YouTube--in hopes of getting that business to start making money--or mobile software.
At the moment, my bet is on the YouTube-mobile option: does Google really want to risk holding up HTML 5 adoption any further, regardless of the hint they dropped in the press release that "video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform"?
Shankland: Those alternatives aren't mutually exclusive. Google might just be buying trying to lower its costs by sidestepping YouTube's current streaming technology, which uses Adobe Systems' Flash software. Dan Rayburn, executive vice president at StreamingMedia.com, says Google doesn't have to pay Adobe fees to use Flash at YouTube. But Laura Martin, an analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics, believes that using On2 technology could trim YouTube's network bandwidth costs.
In the long run, though, getting On2's technology accepted as a built-in Web video standard could help both YouTube and Google's grander ambitions for the Web.
Google controls Chrome, of course, but getting the other 97 percent of the browser world to move will be harder. When it comes to building support for Web video straight into the Web, rather than using a plug-in such as Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight, Apple's Safari uses H.264 while Mozilla and Opera use a license-free alternative called Ogg Theora. Chrome will support both, but Internet Explorer doesn't have any support at all.
Right now, that video variety has been a thorny issue for the effort to hammer out HTML 5, the next incarnation of the Hypertext Markup Language that's used to describe Web pages. Even though the video tag looks like a big part of HTML 5, specification author (and Google employee) Ian Hickson so far isn't naming a codec.
Krazit: "Thorny issue" seems like an understatement. Why would injecting a third standard (that not everyone believes is necessarily a superior option) make sense, at this point? I suppose that there's a Clintonian "third way" argument to be applied here, in that if Apple and Mozilla are lining up on opposite sides of the debate over H.264 versus Ogg Theora, a freely available version that has clear patent ownership collected in one place might solve some of the sticking points on either side. Still, we'd be once again dependent on Google's "Dude, you can totally trust us. We're Google!" argument that it won't later subvert the standard with patent claims.
Not to mention the fact that Microsoft and its Internet Explorer are still unlikely to play ball, no matter what Google proposes.
Shankland: Well, one way Google could win over Mozilla at least is by releasing the codec as open-source software. That may or may not be possible, depending on what On2 has had to license, but Google apparently isn't happy enough with Ogg Theora's quality to bring it to YouTube, according to Hickson.
But I wouldn't rule out Microsoft quite so fast, even though I'm sure that it would like to get as much royalty revenue as possible through Silverlight video streaming and its own video codecs. Google has an affinity for open-source licenses such as Apache that permit use of code in proprietary software. That could reduce the philosophical barriers to Microsoft. And if Google can offer a high-quality codec in the HTML 5 standardization effort, maybe making On2's codec into open-source software could help coax the Internet Explorer team on board.
Let's not forget that HTML 5 is under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and they don't like standards encumbered by royalty constraints.
Also, if I were writing standards, I'd favor codecs such as On2's that also work on mobile devices. The iPhone doesn't support Flash, and I'm sure that Google wants YouTube on as many handsets as possible.
Krazit: Google's trying to pull off a lot these days, when it comes to making the Web the future platform for developers. It's a huge proponent of the HTML 5 push, devoting an entire day of Google I/O in May to explaining why this move is so important, and preaching to developers about how open standards and browser-based development are the wave of the future.
But you'd think that at some point, the company would start thinking of ways to differentiate its own products against the rest. Chrome and the forthcoming Chrome OS are ostensibly being developed with the hope that they will gain traction in the market. How will they do that, however, if they are just cookie-cutter versions of the same standards-based technologies on which everybody else jumps?
One way would be through offering excellent video performance that isn't widely available to the rest of the world, i.e., keeping VP8 and future On2 codec derivatives either in-house or available for a fee. Is Google going to open-source everything it ever develops under the strategy that anything that gets people on the Web ultimately comes back to its bottom line? Surely, that can't scale.
Shankland: No, Google won't open-source everything--and stop calling me Shirley. The company loves improving the Web as a foundation for applications, an effort that needles companies such as Microsoft or Apple that have their own developer ecosystems to nuture. But when it comes to the applications themselves--Gmail and Google Docs, for example--Google isn't so into sharing.
So I guess that some of this On2 situation comes down to the extent to which the video codec work is an end or merely a means to an end, like Chrome.
Krazit: Google isn't saying, at least for now. There's little doubt that online video is a crucial component of the future Web (CBS' David Poltrack is telling television critics this week that big money is coming to online video), and something will need to assume a role as the future technology enabler of Web video.
In the end, however, it must be nice to be able to make $100 million bets with relative ease. Nothing could come of On2's technology, and Google would hardly be worse off than it was a day ago.
Updated 1:24 p.m. PDT with new information about Flash licensing and YouTube expenses.
