Chrome Is A Classic Crown Jewels Attack

In my book Attacking The Crown Jewels, I describe how great companies defend their strategy by using what I call a crown jewels attack. This can be summarized as follows:

1. Attack away from the competitor's offering that threatens your strategy
2. Attack one of its offerings that is essential to its strategy, one of its crown jewels
3. Attack with sufficient credibility that the competitor must defend itself by diverting resources away from the offering that is threatening you in order to short up its crown jewel that you attack

Google's Chrome browser is a classic example of this defensive strategy. In spite of all of its missteps, Microsoft remains the number one threat to Google's search-monitized-through-advertising business. Chrome attacks Internet Explorer directly and Windows indirectly. Yes, Chrome threatens Windows, Microsoft's premier crown jewel.

For Microsoft, Internet Explorer exists to protect Windows. So long as Internet Explorer is the dominant browser, Microsoft can guarantee that the underlying operating system remains relevant. FireFox and Safari peck away at Internet Explorer, but Chrome attacks it in a more fundamental way. Google has made it clear that it intends to drive Chrome in a direction that will make the underlying operating system irrelevant by making the browser a powerful, unobtrusive applications platform on a wide range of computer devices.

Add this to the Google Office Bamboozle (search on those three words for more on this) and you can see how effective Google is in its strategic competitive defense.