Google has announced an app store for the Chrome OS and a raft of other web-based initiatives, describing the web as “the only platform” that matters.
“The web is the most important platform of our generation,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, said at the opening session of Google’s annual developer conference in San Francisco yesterday.
“Because it’s a platform controlled by none of us, it’s the only platform truly controlled by all of us. It’s our duty to move that platform forward,” the NY Times reported him saying.
The Chrome Web Store, which will be open later this year, would enable people find the best web applications across the internet, Google said on its blog.
Terry McDonell, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, showed off the magazine’s web application, a customizable, free app that acts as a template onto which users can add their own sports content.
Google also announced a partnership with VMWare “to make it easier for companies to build rich web apps and deploy them to the cloud of their choice,” and a the Google App Engine for Business which would enable companies to build internal apps.
The two cloud initiatives “may alarm a host of players, including Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce.com,” noted Chris Nuttall on the FT tech blog.
The search firm also foreshadowed web media format WebVM and video codec VP8, a rival to Adobe’s flash and possibly H.264.