Matthew's Journal

It's simpler than that, I think. This is a play against Microsoft Office, and IE8 just doesn't cut it as a platform for Javascript-heavy applications. They've employed thirty or forty good people to write their browser, over three or four years (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html), so it's cost them maybe a quarter of a million dollars an employee over that period? Which works out at around $30m US, or to put it into perspective, about 0.5% of a Youtube. Google Chrome is cheap.

Anyway, the whole "don't be evil" thing is just economics and good business sense, isn't it? Google's entire business model depends on maintaining the trust of its users, just as a bank's does, or a telco, or a big food retailer. They're not going to be nice, sure, but they can't afford to be hated and mistrusted in the way Microsoft are hated and mistrusted, because the Google/GMail/Google Docs data lockin isn't nearly as strong as the Exchange/Outlook/Office format one. They can afford not to be the best, as long as they're close, but they can't afford to be untrustworthy.