Today Google (see chart here) announced the launch of its new web browser – called Chrome (see Marketwatch article here).  At first blush this may seem quite techie, thus uninteresting to most of us.  But it is big news for some very important companies – and well worth watching.

Is Chrome better than Internet Explorer from Microsoft (see chart here)?  I don’t know, but I don’t really care right now.  There can be a lot of technical debate about what browser is best – but we all know that with IT products being a great product isn’t what’s important.  If the market were dominated by great products we sure wouldn’t be using applications from Microsoft – nor databases from Oracle – or software packages from SAP.  As Geoffrey Moore has written about extensively in his books (Crossing the Chasm, The Gorilla Game, and Dealing with Darwin to name just 3), success in high tech products – like success in most products – has more to do with your ability to manage the product lifecycle and attract customers than how good the product is. 

What we should care about is that Google, a company known for its search engine and its ad placement machine just launched a new product into a very large market against the world’s largest software supplier (based on number of individual users).  With a product that’s ostensibly free.  This is a clear action by Google demonstrating its ability to follow The Phoenix Principle:

1. Google is taking a product to market based upon their scenario of the future – not the market today.  They see how a better browser makes getting your work done easier and faster.
2. Google is focused on the competition, not currenct customers or their own internal machinations.  They see a Locked-in, moribund competitor that is unable to move into new solutions.
3. Google is willing to be internally Disruptive by entering entirely new markets, using entirely new metrics and with entirely different requirements for success.
4. Google is using White Space to figure out how to grow revenue in the application market that everyone who uses the internet needs – a connection page/application we call a browser. 

This is a very big deal.  It means Google is not at all willing to rest on its laurels.  Yes, it pretty much owns the "search" business and it is hugely in front with on-line ad placement.  But it’s not just Locked-in to those markets and focused on Defending & Extending them.  It’s ready to go into a very different market with a very different requirement for Success.  It’s willing to use White Space to learn how to maintain its extra-ordinary growth rate.  This is a very big deal.  Google has shown it will give its people permission to do very different things, in very different markets, and authorize the resources to push into those markets aggressively.  This is a very, very important step for Google that portends quite good things.

Now to the company with 75% market share – Microsoft.  You might laugh and think Microsoft has little to fear.  That would be like laughing when Alfred Sloan started selling all those different kinds of cars at General Motors when Ford had 75% share with the Model T.  Or laughing at Honda when it first brought the Civic to American and GM + Ford + Chrysler had almost 90% of the U.S. auto market.  Microsoft is big, but it’s not invulnerable.  Microsoft has sat on its laurels.  It’s efforts at "search" were a dismal failure.  It completely missed the ad placement market.  Microsoft has not offered customers an exciting advance they are willing to buy in desktop applications for years.  And its last effort to excite customers with a new operating system was so ignored it had to force distributors to take Vistage by refusing to ship its old product – to howls of complaints.  Microsoft is big and has lots of money – but so did Ford, GM, Woolworth’s, Xerox and a long list of other companies that once dominated a market only to fall prey to Disruptive competitors while they practiced Defend & Extend management.

What’s worse is the likely impact on Yahoo! (see chart here).  Yahoo! was first to make "search" into a business (not the first search engine, but the first to make it a profitable business).  But it’s share has consistently eroded as Yahoo! kept trying to do more of what it always did – while Google went out and used White Space to develop Disruptive solutions.  While Yahoo! clung to its ad agency roots, Google developed the world’s largest data center to house servers for those billions of searches we all do.  Google developed its own servers, and its own facilities located near rivers to cool them all.  And Google kept doing things on the cutting edge of internet use to find out what would create more and better on-line advertising generating new revenue for itself.  Yahoo! is trying to find a way to survive – while Google is going into whole new business initiatives with White Space Yahoo! hasn’t even considered.

Today’s announcement wasn’t just a product release by Google.  Chrome shows us that Google is a company doing all the right things to stay in the Rapids of fast growth.  Unlike Microsoft and Dell that Locked-in early and built a business on Defend & Extend tactics which eventually left them without innovation – Google is using White Space to get into markets that attack the heart of its biggest —- and most Locked-in —- competitor.  We can expect Microsoft will do nothing – nothing but try to argue that it is biggest so best.  Meanwhile, Google is taking advantage of Microsoft’s Lock-in to take customers into new solutions.  This is very good news for Google investors, and very bad news for Microsoft and Yahoo! investors.  Not because Chrome is a great product, but because it shows Google is a Phoenix Principle company while Microsoft and Yahoo! are Locked-in to D&E practices that are sending them to declining returns and marginal performance.