Google Chrome Apps: The Widget Economy Is Back

With all this talk of a cloud-based Chrome OS, it's time to take a cold hard look at what "apps" in this brave new world will look like. I recall a time, not long ago, when Apple was about to change the world with Dashboards and before that Windows users had their own "widget economy." Then Yahoo! added widgets to the web and then Samsung added widgets to their TVs. And widgets appeared here, there, and everywhere. But do widgets beget money? No, because they are, by definition, useless as standalone products. Case in point: I just "downloaded" the Netflix "app" from the Google Chrome App Store and, to my great disappointment, it resulted in an additional widget in my toolbar and little else. When you click on it you see a top 100 list of Netflix movies. Also available is a list of top rentals, new instant and DVD-based movies, and genres. If you click on the Queue button you go to Netflix proper in your browser and if you click "play" another window opens and asks you to update Silverlight. It's more of a constant ad for Netflix than a real way to interact with the service.

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