This bit from The Doc Searls Weblog is spot on:
Yes, I know that it only makes sense to make client software first for the platform with nine out of the ten slices in the market’s pie. But it’s that tenth slice that keeps the company making the other nine from enjoying a monopoly. At fighting Microsoft’s client monopoly, Google isn’t helping much. Quite the contrary, in fact.
I hate that Google doesn’t wait to release software on all platforms simultaneously, as they are an Internet company, and I think being an Internet company means keeping the Internet free, not locking it down to one Operating System. Read Doc’s entire post for a really smart take on this. I want Google to actually not be evil, but things like this make me think that perhaps being evil is something they cannot avoid as they grow.
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You know, I hadn’t thought about the problem being an unwillingness to wait until software is ready for all platforms (as Mozilla does, and as Skype does now); but that’s it, exactly. If you want to be an Internet Company, and see the Net as the True Platform, you release the same software for mutilple clients.
The problem is, Google shows no intention of *ever* wanting to release some of this software (e.g. Picasa) on anything other than Windows. That may not be evil, but it does suck.
Yes. I keep mentioning the Picasa thing over on TUAW every so often, and a lot of the readers reply “But we have iPhoto!” Google most likely is also sitting there saying, “But you have iPhoto!”
But that’s entirely missing the point. In a free market non-evil Internet world, more choices is better; otherwise, everything leads to a monopoly and you are in a Microsoft-dominated world where people lose billions of dollars to viruses because the monster has become too big to properly support itself.
The behavior is essentially the difference between catering to your user-base (and when you are an Internet company your user-base is the world and every type of computer that plugs into that world) and trying to force your user-base to submit to your decision of the Correct Path for the World ™.