Google's Chrome, Gmail, Docs rock outlook for Microsoft's Outlook

In his commentary today, Microsoft Watch's Joe Wilcox  contends that Gmail and its expanding universe of modular add-ons is rapidly evolving into "an informational hub for all productivity and communications" in much the same way that Outlook anchors the Office productivity suite.

Wilcox wonders "What happens if in the future Google ties some features to Chrome? Hypothetical: Gmail is good with Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari but great with Google Chrome." That idea, if it comes to pass, should scare the pants off Microsoft, Wilcox asserts.

Well, that's exactly what Chrome's director of product management, Brian Rakowski has in mind. I spoke with Brian last week. "Google Chrome is built with more advanced applications in mind. For that reason, any of the Web apps you might use should perform better in Chrome." Replace the words "more advanced applications" with "Google applications" and you get the idea. Google created its new browser, he says, because the others were too slow - and that was essentially holding back progress in the Web apps space. He wants Google apps such as Google Docs to look, feel and respond just like locally executing applications on the desktop.

But the Gmail-centric empire, if it gels, will have been constructed using a strategy that is the 180 degree opposite of Microsoft's approach.

Just as Google Docs is the anti-Office, Chrome is the anti-IE. Both Google products are streamlined and fast, with clean, simple interfaces. The variety of Gmail add-ons, the modular approach Wilcox mentions as the Google's key competitive weapon, strikes at the very heart of what has been wrong with the Microsoft model: it's too top heavy.

In a Web 2.0 world, Google's bottom up approach to adding application features is a real win. Simply sliding over the bulky Office empire won't work. Nor will a "Microsoft Works" approach to the Web 2.0 challenge.

The sinister view of Google's strategy that lurks under the surface here is that Chrome will somehow evolve to provide proprietary technologies that give it a unique ability to lock in users to Chrome and the Googleplex, much the same way that Microsoft did when it bundled IE into Windows and added an array of proprietary technologies in the bad old browser wars days of the mid-1990s.

But so far, Google hasn't chosen that path. Chrome's rendering engine is built upon the open source WebKit developed by Apple. Its faster speeds are related to its V8 JavaScript processing engine, which innovates by optimizing how it executes existing Javascript code, not by requiring proprietary tweaks that change that code - and that only work with its Web applications.

Not that Google could pull that off if it wanted to. Chrome simply doesn't have enough market share for any developer to create Web sites with Chrome-specific attributes.

So if Google succeeds in its strategy it will have done so while playing by the rules of open source and W3C standards.

If that's not enough to scare the pants off Microsoft, I'm not sure what is.