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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Developers. Developers. Developers...

I'd love to know if there's an internal debate inside Google and if they are aware of how much recent decisions have damaged their reputation amongst a critical demographic.

I could not understand the decision to drop Chrome Frame. It seemed like a good strategic product but even more so - a lot of people had staked their reputation on a technology choice because of it's existence. These people were the thin end of a wedge inside enterprise cultures that were historically dominated by Microsoft evangelists. Google has now pissed off these people and made them look bad.

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Conversely I never saw the point of Chrome Frame. Most enterprises that lock their users into IE certainly also forbid them from installing arbitrary browser plugins.

Chrome Frame doesn't need admin rights to install so I presume it bypassed a lot of IT lockdown?

Chrome itself doesn't need admin rights to install either.

>I could not understand the decision to drop Chrome Frame.

They didn't drop Chrome Frame. It was a stopgap solution from the very beginning. It gave companies 4 (!) more years to fix their infrastructure. It did what it was supposed to do.

If you haven't done anything within those 4 years, giving you another 2 won't help either. You're clearly waiting for everything to fall apart.

After they had enough market share with Chrome they just figured they could force people to install Chrome.

They could believe that about consumers but if I find it hard to believe they were naive enough to think this would work in large organizations.

So what were they thinking? Is the number of large organizations stuck on old IE (<=8) not important enough to Google? Or - more worryingly - did they not think it through properly?

I just don't see how that decision got made. Even freezing/slowing development on Chrome Frame would have been bearable - but dropping it?

Why is Google obligated to hand over marketshare to its competitors without any objection?

Sorry - I don't understand what you mean here.

for example i need a charting solution, and google charts seem good enough.. but now would they abandon it?... all google bets are risky...

That could be said for any service you pay for. Large companies will close down projects that aren't doing well. Small companies can close their doors when they run out of money.

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