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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

It was a product that no one had asked for and no one was waiting for, and wasn't intended to make a dime.

I disagree, many of us wanted this but none of us had the money to fund it... Google has a special kind of magic for the time... IBM would fund some developers to work on Mozilla... Mozilla had some money to fund development on Mozilla... Apple had a few funds for developers to maintain a browser for Apple... Microsoft was happy to maintain IE... Google was different it was a place for innovation. It disrupted search, email (gmail) and mapping (google maps)... now to support those 3 products it made sense to fund a better browser... then with the purchase of YouTube... 4 disruptive web based platforms it made even more sense to fund a browser. I hear chrome team saved youtube billions in network costs (per year) just by ensuring more adoption of vp8/9... Today we tend to focus more on the ad business Google purchased doubleclick and the evils of it's tracking... but think back to this Google had at least 5 major disruptive technologies... search, email, mapping, video consumption, and the 5th IMO... enabling countless businesses to build successful web applications because of the development of a "good" browser.

You're not getting the point.

Chrome never needed to slay itself, because there was no customer expecting delivery. It literally couldn't be late because there was no set schedule. It was done when the engineers finished it.

Like many projects at Google. My experience in general is they don't do schedule-discipline well at all. And management there seems to think throwing ever more headcount at things will make them ship faster (it rarely does).

And there's very little accounting when promised dates are missed. Even by years. I worked on the software for Home Hub, and everything was supposed to get rewritten in Fuchsia, and they promised to be ready in like two quarters, almost immediately after we shipped it. They had unlimited headcount and the blessing of upper management, but failed schedule after schedule with no consequence. It took them another two and a half years.

Wanted or not, nobody (or at least not many people) asked for google to make a browser, and nobody waited for it, which was what the parent comment said.

Also I had a really hard time reading your comment with all the ellipses making it seem like it was just a huge sentence, that might just be me though.

It was also based on existing open source. None of this is to say that Chrome wasn't an amazing accomplishment. I do wonder how much crunch time the Chrome teams face now that Chrome has customers?

And the company's fortunes did not rest on the product being successful.

Seeing as it's money-losing (like virtually all of non-ad google), it wouldn't have helped anyway. The only value to Chrome for Google is the monopolistic market-distortion through vertical integration.

At time it was a defense against Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguishing the web through their dominance with IE. Remember ActiveX, VBscript in the browser, etc?

The threat of that had already been greatly reduced by the time Chrome came out. Firefox was quite dominant, and IE had become much more standards compliant.

I just checked and seems like IE was down to around 60% and Firefox up to a third when Chrome launched (not sure how long before that the project was greenlight). So it probably still played a role.

yeah but the demon of IE6 was pretty much done

Which almost proves the point.

I've never seen anything good from intense pressure from above—it barely even changes the timeline. You take the pressure away and you can still solid work in an orderly fashion.

And yet this succeeds very rarely

funny you say that, since we are talking about Google here, because Gmail has a similar story.

People are actually very good at producing products that make no money that no one is asking for.

As opposed to … MSIE?

This is an underrated point

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