Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[TJ Parker]

re Nick Bradbury: Ramblings on Google and the Internet OS

well as an avid goog follower, i have to comment.

I have to give credit to Google for using seemingly simple ideas such as the Google Toolbar to achieve their goals (using IE's ActiveX capabilities to take on Microsoft - you've got to love that).

nothing clever about that. microsoft makes the toolbar and makes it accessible to any developer. its not a great idea per se, its necessary for survival. if microsoft's plan for taking on goog is anything like the plan for taking on netscape, this is how they do it: putting internet search on the desktop with a direct link to search.msn.com. folks won't switch back to goog without further motivation, cuz msft is good at commoditizing these services. there's certainly a big threat to goog search from msft search: netscape redux.

Google has already identified email and digital photos as two of the primary uses of desktop computers, and they've responded with Gmail and (to a much lesser degree, so far) Picasa.

they bought picasa for bloggers, not data storage.

interesting question that i don't have the answer to: how many folks really use web-based email services for all their mail. there's the scary thought that the mail doesn't really belong to you anymore, and that the entire history can never be deleted, can be subpeona'd etc.

Then they release the Google Desktop, which further blurs the line between the web and your desktop by enabling you to search your hard drive using the familiar, simple Google interface.

but again, they're doing this because msft is already doing it. (and there are several other products that actually perform better, since they can also deal with outlook mailboxes, etc.)

What will we see next? GMusic? GDocuments? Others have speculated whether a GBrowser is in the works, although that certainly remains to be seen.

this was refuted.

Regardless, Windows is being marginalized piece by piece, and Microsoft can't stop it. The internet is the next OS, and Google is becoming a primary force behind it.

this is just silly. an OS is the software that manages all of the physical resources, excutes programs, etc. the only real rivals there are apple and linux (both unix variants).

[...] and Google is making it happen...

um, linux is making it happen. and firefox is competing on the browser front. but goog is something different.

now from my own point of view: the goog boyz should stop pretending they're a technology company and come to terms with being an ad broker. what they have is everything that's needed to auction and deliver targeted ads to anything, not just web search. they have everyone's web pages indexed; they have the ads targeted to content; they just need to identify the content in the pages and supply appropriate ads.

like yahoo, without having to become a content aggregator.

the moves against msft, though, look purely defensive wrt a nescape-like attack from them. (however, they could tolerate that if they aren't dependent on search as the only place for targetting ads).

they also seem to be working alot on the web-services side of things (at least, based on who they're hiring). but http://labs.google.com is pretty yawn inducing. although not as bad as http://research.yahoo.com .