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Google One-Ups Apple With Web App Store
The Web giant announced the Chrome Web Store at its third annual developer conference in San Francisco. The storefront, which will likely work exclusively with Google's Chrome browser, is intended to give developers a platform to sell premium Web apps (and, obviously, create another revenue stream for Google).
"Advertising has been a very important form of monetization on the Web," said Google VP Sundar Pichai. "It should be easy to create and sell a premium application on the Web."
Google has traditionally offered its content and applications, from Gmail to Google Calendar, for free and subsidized their creation and maintenance with advertising. Though the company has become the de facto standard for ads on the Web with its massively successful AdSense service, Google obviously has its sights set on bigger things.
The software giant also announced that the long-talked about netbooks running its Chrome OS and using Web-based applications for everything will ship this year. Additionally, the company unveiled a forthcoming open-source, royalty-free video format for Web use called webm.
As much as Google's Android OS has positioned itself as a direct competitor to Apple's dominant iPhone OS, between the Chrome store and Chrome netbooks, Google is getting up in Jobs & co.'s grill in just about every way it can. However it all shakes out, we're glad to see competition in the space. When geniuses are locked in an even struggle for our dollars, we as consumers win.
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