Google and Asus expected to unveil 7" Nexus tablet next week at Google I/O

DigiTimes reports that Google's and Asus' new 7" Nexus Android tablet, to be built for the companies by Quanta Computer (the same company that manufactures the Kindle Fire,) will be launched at next week's Google I/O Conference in San Francisco. The price will reportedly be $199, and the tablet is said to include a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and a front-facing webcam. DigiTimes also says that the tablet will be preloaded with Google's Chrome browser for Android; it's not clear if Chrome will replace or be installed in addition to the legacy Android browser.

Google's many positions on video codecs

Earlier this week, Google announced that it would drop support for the H.264 video codec from the HTML5 video tag in the Chrome browser, and replace it with support for its own WebM (VP8) codec. It also announced its intention to release WebM plug-ins for Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers, which support H.264. Chrome joins Firefox and Opera in supporting WebM with the video tag.

Google suggests that Chrome users who want to access H.264 content use Adobe's Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight plug-ins. What's confusing about this is that the Chrome, Android and Google TV teams all have different views on the codec issue. Android's browser supports H.264, and there's no word from the Android team that they plan to drop it. Google TV doesn't support WebM, and in an interview last year, an executive from Intel was very noncommittal about future WebM support. Similarly, YouTube, which supports both H.264 and WebM, has said nothing about dropping support for H.264.

So, the message from Google seems to be "Use WebM for Chrome, H.264 for Android and Google TV, and either one for YouTube." It would be hard for them to be more confusing, or more confused. If you create or distribute Internet video to the desktop, set-top and mobile devices, you now have more to keep track of, and more transcoding to do.

It would be nice if Google would speak with a single voice, but its management doesn't seem capable of coordinating the actions of multiple product teams.

Eric Schmidt says that Chrome OS is a thin client. Really?

Google just ended its launch event for Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store will offer HTML5/AJAX applications, and it's pretty straightforward. Far more perplexing was Google's launch of its Chrome OS. The principle of Chrome OS is that it's the Chrome browser with only the necessary additional system-level hooks to control the underlying hardware of a netbook or similar device. The entire user interface is inside the browser window--there's no separate "desktop".

Google repeatedly said that Chrome OS is perfect for netbooks, and the company has been running it on its own prototype netbooks in-house. Acer and Samsung have committed to ship netbooks with Chrome OS some time in mid-2011. However, netbook sales have slowed as the iPad has gained popularity, and a flood of new tablets next year will drive netbook sales even lower.

So, will Chrome OS work on tablets? The Chrome OS team was asked about it in the Q&A session and sidestepped the question. Google didn't show any tablets running Chrome OS, and it didn't demonstrate any multitouch features. Android appears to be Google's tablet solution. If the market is moving away from netbooks and toward tablets, and Android is Google's tablet platform, why is Google putting resources into Chrome OS?

The answer was surprising. Google's Eric Schmidt said that Chrome OS is, in fact, the first commercially-acceptable implementation of the thin client architecture that Sun tried to sell years ago. Really? The reason for thin clients was that personal computers cost a lot of money and were difficult to maintain in a corporate IT architecture. Today, PCs are dirt cheap (cheaper than thin clients were "back in the day"), and it's far easier for IT departments to maintain their networks of computers.

So, does this mean that Chrome OS is being built for a platform (netbooks) that's rapidly becoming obsolete, and for an application (thin clients) that's already obsolete? Is anyone from the Android team talking with the Chrome OS team? Are they even in the same company? In short, is there anyone in charge at Google?

Flash Player 10.2: A big improvement?

Like many users, my experience with Adobe's Flash Player hasn't been a happy one, and it's gotten worse as Adobe has "improved" the player over time. Video playback using the Flash Player in both Firefox and Internet Explorer has gotten so bad for me on Windows that I've switched to Google Chrome for viewing Flash video. Adobe has apparently been paying attention to the criticism, and the beta of Flash Player 10.2 November 30th that the company released on its Adobe Labs website is the first version in a long time with significantly better video performance for virtually all users, not just those with dedicated H.264 acceleration.

Flash Player 10.2 is the first public implementation of Adobe's Stage Video architecture, which makes better use of whatever video acceleration (usually in the GPU) is available in the user's computer. Adobe claims that Stage Video decreases CPU usage by up to 85%. As a practical matter, Flash videos are playing cleanly, without stuttering or dropouts, on Windows using Flash Player 10.2 in both Firefox and IE. Windows 7/IE 9 users will also benefit from graphic acceleration using any available hardware rendering capabilities. If you're using Flash Player 10.1 or earlier and you don't need to continue using it for development purposes, I strongly recommend uninstalling 10.1 and replacing it with 10.2.

How serious is Microsoft about HTML5?

A few weeks ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer group, went on the record declaring the company's support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9. The Internet community generally applauded his remarks, although there was some consternation about his statement that IE9 will only support H.264 video. However, one point was generally ignored: IE9 will only be available for Vista and Windows 7, not for Windows XP, nor for any other desktop platform. It's not even clear that a full implementation of IE9 will be available for Windows Phone 7, which may well become a tablet platform in the future.

Microsoft claims that IE9 won't work on any platform besides Vista and Windows 7 because of the "magical" acceleration features they're using in the operating system. Bulls#!t. Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all cross-platform and all work much better than IE8. The reason that Microsoft will only support Vista and Windows 7 is that, as usual, they want to encourage upgrades to Windows 7. Thus, Microsoft is all for HTML5, but only if you buy Windows 7. If you're running another operating system, they won't support HTML5 at all.

Microsoft's corner of the universe keeps getting smaller and smaller, largely through the company's own actions.

Don't cry for me, innovation

Today's New York Times website has an article on the importance of maintaining investments in innovation, even with an economic downturn. My question is, what innovation? I track a variety of technology-related industries, and I've been hard-pressed to find anything recently that qualifies as a real innovation. One of Google's most exciting recent innovations is the ability to read and index text in images of pages, such as in PDF documents. I worked for Palantir, the company that invented most of that technology, 23 years ago. Or how about Google Chrome, which was all the rage a few weeks ago? It's largely based on open-source Webkit technology and a JavaScript compiler that Google acquired, rather than developed in-house. And, it's a browser. I was in the browser business near the beginning as well, at Netscape, 13 years ago.

The problem isn't encouraging innovation in an economic downturn, it's producing true innovation, period. Economic downturns often help, rather than hurt, innovation. Just as forest fires burn away the underbrush that stifles forest growth, so companies are forced to focus on products and services that really matter. The survivors in each product segment become clear, and the people who work for the losers either take their ideas to the winners or go start their own companies. A new wave of start-ups is born, and some of them do really interesting things, rather than merely cloning what someone else is doing with a minor twist.

I say let the big companies batten down the hatches, and let the start-ups without business models die off. The big guys will do what they've been doing for a long time, which is buying their best ideas from others. So long as there's venture capital and engineers & scientists driven to build the next big thing, innovation will take care of itself.

Obligatory Google Chrome Post

Yes, I've installed Google Chrome, and no, it's not an Internet Explorer killer, at least not yet. My browser of choice is Firefox 3, and I see nothing in Chrome at this point that will get me to switch. The biggest advanage that I see so far is that Chrome seems to be considerably faster in loading pages than either IE or Firefox. Chrome uses the same WebKit rendering engine that Safari uses, and Safari has been roundly praised for its speed, so it's no surprise that Chrome is fast. Google benchmarks show that Chrome's V8 JavaScript compiler is much faster than the interpreters in IE, Firefox and Opera, but the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 will have its own JavaScript compiler, so Chrome's performance advantage may be short-lived.

It's going to take a long time for Chrome to get the same kind of third-party developer support that Firefox already has, but I don't think that's Google's objective: I think that they're targeting users who want simple, fast browsing, and couldn't care less whether the browser supports add-ons. Click one button and it's installed. Every visitor to Google Search is a potential user. That's got to scare Microsoft, even if Chrome is less sophisticated in many ways than IE.

I've visited some sites that don't recognize the Chrome user agent, and thus either limit access or won't give access to Chrome users at all. Therefore, the onus is now on Google to get site developers to support Chrome. That's not going to be easy, because other than the Google name, I haven't seen anything compelling enough to get most people to switch from their existing browser to Chrome.