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Google’s Chrome has been out for a little over three weeks and after an initial burst and giving hiccups to its rivals, IE and Firefox; it has started to fall in ranks with the latest usage marked at 0.77% as reports have it. The reason? Well it’s obviously lack of proper marketing, despite given Google’s reach to the very core of the web world.

If one were to ask for a reason other than that, I bet it’s going to be why Eric Schmidt didn’t introduce it big time as a browser first up? He was honing at it being a platform for numerous applications and the next phase of what browsers are going to be. Frankly speaking what has the vast majority of the population got to do with it being so? I mean most of the users simply use browsers for browsing and words like platform for developers might very well give nightmares to most of them.

Net Applications EVP, Vince Vizzaccaro highlighted this in his statement, pointing at how Chrome had shot to a 1% share amongst browsers within hours of its launch and has since then being decaying constantly:

Chrome started off pretty fast and furious. Within 24 hours they surpassed 1% of usage market share which was shocking and impressive. Since then, they have been slowly fading in market percentages. The trend has a slight downward angle to it.

Rivals at Microsoft have opined not to comment at this while John Lily of Mozilla considers it too early to make a prediction. I guess that’s pretty  sensible given that its been only three weeks since Chrome was launched. The usage for the browser rises after office hours and specially late at night, when its usage is at peak. This also highlights the current trend within firms, most of them don’t allow employees to run any other browser save for the Internet Explorer. But that’s a different story and it’s to early to call Chrome a failure as well.

Why Google has refrained from marketing it the way it should have been? Well the only reason in my opinion could be that Google perhaps never intended it to be a browser, the browser was perhaps a plus that comes with a product. The basic idea behind Chrome is to put a browser based platform into every machine as Schmidt had said:

Chrome is more than a browser, it is a platform for applications. From my perspective, the Chrome announcement is the beginning of a new platform.

Let’s give Chrome ample time and see where it rises up with time or disappears into nothingness.