Monday, December 28, 2009

Google makes its home page a Chrome page | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

A subtly significant marketing milestone for Google

Those nice people at Google, engineers at heart rather than craven, money-grabbing business people, seem to have suffered a sudden attack of commercialism.

The folks at the Silicon Alley Insider alerted me to this startlingly commercial ad on the Google home page. It can't be, I thought. So I went to Google.com myself and there it still was: a dry little thing in the right-hand corner suggesting that I should download Google Chrome.

When I first go to the main Google page, I see

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A clean page… until I move the mouse or start typing, when I then see

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(By default it also had my Google id, but I signed out before taking the screen clip.)

And clicking the Google Pack link, you’ll see

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As the hierarchy/indentation above suggests, you can’t choose Google Apps unless you also choose Chrome.  I wonder how much more Adobe had to pay, to have Reader selected by default (unlike Firefox, Skype, or RealPlayer).

Looks like the marketing group has trumped the home page design group, inside the Googleplex. 

Google makes its home page a Chrome page | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

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