Google Chrome OS App Store .... Awww Snap...

This week the good folks at Google said they were developing an App store, much like Apple's iTunes  App Store,  which ill serve users of the company's Chrome Browser and Chrome OS. Apparently these apps will run on most browsers, but the target market is people who use the Chrome browser.

People like me.

I am typing this blog post into Blogger (a Google product) using a Chrome browser (another Google product). Or, I am trying to. Lately I have been seeing  a lot of this when I use Chrome to use any of my Google services:

For those of you who have not experienced this, the Aw, Snap! page is Google's equivalent to the Sad Mac icon that older Macintosh computers used to give you when things went horribly wrong.
See, that's how we know that Google is a fast moving company of hipster developers moving at the speed of thought to develop cutting edge software applications and operating systems, when something goes wrong they give you a familiar, if dated, bit of pop-culture lingo that is supposed to make you feel like the company is part of the world you live in.

No, I am not picking on Google for the homage (that's what we call this kind of thing in the comics industry), I'm picking on them for not getting their shit straight. The only time I see this Aw Snap! page is when I am using a Google browser to use a Google product. Gmail, Adsense, Adwords, these are the only pages I see this warning pop up on.

Don't get me wrong, I really like Gmail and I own an Android phone (this after years and years of being a Mac guy, I refused to buy an iPhone because making a phone call on my phone is important and ATT just flat out sucks) and I have been using Google Docs more and more for things like contracts and sales reports that need to be shared with other people. Google Sketch Up is a wondrous product as well. 

So, when Google says they want to develop an App store to go along with an entire operating system you might think I would be enthusiastic. Well, I am not, but not because I am somehow dark on Google, it's because I am dark on the way the entire computer industry rolls out product, especially software product.

Let's say you were buying a car, and you spent a ton of money on a brand new one, but for whatever reason the brakes in the car only worked occasionally and the engine tended to overheat during normal use so that you needed to shut the machine down and restart it every so often while driving. You would think you have a lemon, right?

Well, this is the way software is developed. You release a product with known flaws, get people to buy it and let them figure out what's wrong with it. Then you sell them a new version that fixes the flaws of the previous version, but then introduces new flaws or subtracts some bit of functionality. Staying in the car scenario, you just bought a new car, and the brakes were faulty, so the company instead of replacing the brakes sells you a new car with better brakes, but a transmission that is shitty and, oh yeah, it no longer has air conditioning because that's what was causing the brakes to fail.

Anyway, not picking on Google per se, but the mindset of the entire tech industry. Everyone is so focused on market share and on developing closed systems that kill competition that they have forgotten that the thing that got them where they were was a healthy competitive environment and an expectation that everyone would have a similar set of standards that everything could build on.

So, imagine that Google builds a successful App store, then makes it only work on a Chrome browser, which in turn only works in a Chrome OS, which in turn only comes on certain computers, which in turn are buggy because they cannot support the weight and expectations that the user has for them, what has really been accomplished. If I have to buy five different versions of the same application to use with my different devices, well, I probably won't use any of them. It's the other reason I don't own an iPhone or use an iPad, the closed system really turns me off.

So, have fun with your App store Google, but if you really want to build something successful you might want to make sure that the Apps you build at least work with each other.