Don't bet it all on Google Chrome

Think that Google's much-ballyhooed new Web browser, Chrome, is aimed at helping people surf the Web? Think again.
The browser instead takes dead aim at Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange. If Google has its way, your enterprise will use Chrome as a platform for Web-based applications from Google. You'll abandon Office, Outlook and others, and you'll bid Microsoft goodbye.

Any surfing you do with it, from Google's point of view, is pure gravy.

Even though the world has greeted Chrome as a consumer-level browser, Google didn't conceive of it that way. In a blog post on the company's Web site, Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, made no bones about what Google wanted to do when it designed Chrome:

"We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for Web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

To that end, Chrome is the first browser built from the ground up for a world in which the browser is an enterprise front end for Web-based applications and services such as Google Docs and Gmail.

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