Enough of the new search engines - how about a new browser?

There have been a number of interesting search engine offerings over the last few months and we wanted to write about something new.

Increasingly, we are finding that customers are interacting with the Internet in different ways and that their next purchase might not necessarily come from an interaction with a search engine. Video now dwarfs search with 10 billion pieces of online video were viewed in December 2007 & with 141 million Americans viewing video online every month (did you ever wonder why Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube?) as does social networking (with over 100 million people using Facebook alone). The common elements to all of these facets of customer interaction is the brpwser as everyone needs a browser to use video, social media and the search engines.

If the aim of the game is to influence people as early as possible during their Internet experience then the browser hould be one of the most important things. Browser wars, however, are old hat - Netscape bowed out of the race years ago and today Internet Explorer & Firefox have the market sewn up between them (IE had 72.15% of the market & Mozilla 19.83% in August 2008 according to hitslink.com). In this environment, a move by Google came out of left field. That said, moving into the browser seems like a logical step for a company like Google which needs to protect its advertising revenues.

This move could have real repurcussions for Mozilla which, until now has had a close relationship with Google (their offices are across the road from Google's) and, as such, might show Google's intent to topple Microsoft's dominance. If this is the case, then the next logical step to influence people beofre they are online is for Google to release an open source operating system. You heard it here first.