Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal
WSJ: Chrome Browser Now at 7.24% Market Share
Posted on 08. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google’s Chrome browser worldwide share is now at 7.24%. This is impressive to consider since Chrome was launched in September of 2008 and has blazed through versions and innovative features with new releases, currently at version 5.
The question at hand, now that Chrome is at number three of all browsers, is if it can challenge Firefox. NetApplications, the source for the Wall Street Journal Data, puts Firefox in second place to Internet Explorer at 23.81%. In an interview with Gizmodo, Mozilla Open Source Evangelist Christopher Blizzard said that the threat of Chrome overtaking Firefox does not seem to be one of his concerns. In fact, he believes that the fact Mozilla focuses solely on the browser will give his organization competitive advantage.
“What we’re gonna have, I think, with Firefox 4 is that we’re gonna have a Javascript engine that’s a generation ahead of everybody else, which will be pretty interesting. We’re the only one that makes browsers! We don’t sell ads, we don’t make operating systems. We don’t sell hardware. We just make browsers,” Blizzard told Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanon.
And in terms of competing directly against Google, “As long as we stand behind the technology that we have, and continue to improve and invest in it as a mechanism for getting the larger goals done, we’re gonna be fine. I’m not that worried about competing with them.”
That’s good to hear Mozilla has no qualms going up against Chrome. It will be for the best, in the long run, for there to be competing web browsers pushing technology forward – more like web platforms than browsers at this point actually. Firefox’s beta releases of version 4 have shown that they aren’t a afraid of taking something in Chrome and making it a feature in their browser to remain a worthy rival. Anyways, remember when it was only Microsoft that dominated the browser market? It was a black hole in terms of web innovation. Plus IE was hacked a lot, not really a fun time to remember.
By the way, NetApplications by all accounts must be the authority on browser share. In the past, there have been disputes over the validity of calculating browser share worldwide, but major publications seem to quote NetApplications most often in browser research.
Asana Gets $9 Million in Venture Capital
Posted on 30. Nov, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
The Wall Street Journal is reporting in its print edition that two founders of Facebook recently were awarded $9 million in funding for their new venture called Asana. Although this is newsworthy due to the amount of investment, the real kicker is that the pair, Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, are not discussing what exactly their freshly capitalized business will be doing. Our intuition is that the company, which received lead funding from Benchmark Capital with support from Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz, is going to launch a web-only application that is going to help businesses with their productivity.
All jokes aside about these two on a mission to pay back the world for all the lost time workers spend on the job surfing Facebook, Asana and its funding is could likely be a response to the November 19 preview and source code release of Chrome OS , showing off what Google plans to bring to market in 2010. The target customers for Asana’s purported web app will probably be small and midsize businesses that are looking for low cost, flexible software that helps their businesses grow.
Rosenstein, per an interview with Rafe Needleman of CNET said, “We started Asana to change the way people manage information, and speed up work by an order of magnitude.” As well as helping people become, “vastly more productive,”.
Asana, which ironically is a Sanskrit word that refers to something static, will be something that is light and responsive which would fit perfectly with the Chrome mission. We’ll keep an eye on this one and post updates when we learn more about exactly what Asana plans to do and how we think it relates to the Chrome OS.
