Will Google Launch a Flash Competitor?
Will Google Launch a Flash Competitor? I say yes. Steve Gillmor seems to agree.
Will Google Launch a Flash and Silverlight Competitor?
In an extremely insightful post on it here, Gillmor guesses that Google has just made the first step towards creating a Flash and Silverlight competitor (Gillmor focuses only on Silverlight seemingly because so many in the valley love to hate Microsoft).
Back a few months ago, I thought it was an absolutely brilliant move when Microsoft struck a deal to only allow folks to watch the olympics if they installed silverlight. Second, perhaps, to just making it part of the operating system, but we know where that gets you. Now Google is requiring Gmail users to install their own common runtime (Gillmor presumes) in order to use thier new video calling feature they launched in direct competition to sites like Skype, TokBox, and free video chat service SnapYap. They could have written this in Flash, but I’m sure their licensing fees to Adobe would be massive, and Google probably took less in capex to develop their own code, they have the distribution channel, plus they can deploy a much richer experience.
