The hope of toolbars and their impact on customer relationships
The voice of Google, Matt Cutts, has published in his blog, that the Version 4 of the famous Google toolbar is out. Why a lot of companies like Yahoo, Amazon, eBay or Google are trying to get a lot of toolbars installed, is obvious: it stays much longer with the potential customer (yes, that would be you), than a website could impress.
Toolbars have been a strong binding in the past and if you can not win the browser war, you should at least try to make a good battle with a toolbar.
But one thing should be mentioned: a toolbar is almost always some kind of “spyware” and you should only install one, if you a really confident that the company, who produces the toolbar, could have your banking details without “doing evil”.
Another thing that should be mentioned is, that I give Google a thumbs up on trying to create long term customer relationships. First the promotion of the Firefox browser, now the continued support of their toolbar indicate that they are well aware of “Windows Vista on the way”: If Microsoft provides a nice and good search engine and makes that a default in the Vista version of their browser, they have a good chance to gain market share quickly.
The toolbar and the Google supported Firefox are just precautions, IMHO.
