Google makes its home page a Chrome page
Without apparent notice or fanfare, Google adorns its home page with a very visible ad for Chrome.
Those nice people at Google, engineers at heart rather than craven, money-grabbing business people, seem to have suffered a sudden attack of commercialism.
The folks at the Silicon Alley Insider alerted me to this startlingly commercial ad on the Google home page. It can't be, I thought. So I went to Google.com myself and there it still was: a dry little thing in the right-hand corner suggesting that I should download Google Chrome.
You might be wondering why Google might have taken this sudden, almost alarming step into advertising's dark hole.
You might consider that it comes soon after Google's extremely engaging Chrome campaign, the one that comes over all Picasso.
You might wonder whether the company has had enough of browser war talk and decided to enact browser war mayhem.
You might also wonder whether, following the rumors of a Google phone, the company has decided that it has had enough of its nice-guy persona. Like a priest who's renounced his vows in order to play the field, Google is going to make a grab for every last dollar in the technological space.
Whatever the reason, it all seems rather sweet. Which is just how Google wants it to seem.