"Come see the results yourself at our project site, where you can check out the source code to the entire product. For Gadgets for Linux, we don't just want to simply release the final offering, but we also want to give everyone a chance to tinker with the code powering the gadgets. For this project, fostering a transparent and lively developer community is just as important as serving our users."
"Google Docs is all about being able to share and collaborate, and now we're taking the idea of sharing a step further with a new Google Docs Community Channel. This is a place to watch videos from regular folks all about Google Docs, connect with others, and pick up smart tips about all the ways to use the application."
"Over the past 11 months, people have created more than 9 million My Maps, encompassing a total of 40 million placemarks. That's an impressive 1 new placemark created every second! We never anticipated that people would become so interested in mapmaking, which used to be accessible only to priests, scholars, and academics."
"This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored."
Flashback, with new comments...
I'm terribly afraid that if I experiment around with these new naming systems in Google I'll end up doing something dreadfully wrong that can't be undone.
Hearkening back to my earlier comment (at the target blog), it would be good to have a sense that someone at Google is taking a long-term view of the Google namespace which is looking woefully used-up about now.
Should we not expect from a company that has outperformed the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft in so many areas a simple explanation of where their naming scheme is headed? Some hints to users regarding preserving the privacy of their e-mail addresses while at the same time making web pages and photo albums public. A few examples would go a long way toward explaining this to those of us who haven't yet intuited where they are going with all of this.
This is one area where Google continues to disappoint.
"We all know how long it can take Google to roll-out new services, but could these final touches mean that Jotspot’s successor Google Sites is slowly getting closer to launch?"
I also want to add that I do think there is a use for this stuff. If you've ever posted any sort of resume online (and I have) you may have given away more information than you would on one of these social networks.
It would make sense to have a central place to post (for example) a complete resume, including all sorts of personal details (name address phone number) but only have that information available to a select few, for example with a key that can be reset as in your Google photo albums. No need for this information to even be available to your "friends" list.
I have at times submitted resumes without full contact information, or without salary history, or without a previous employment history at all.
Can the interface be made simple enough to use, and yet allow for all these variations (and more)? If so, it would be a great alternative to keeping track of all the variations with Word documents, PDFs, etc. Updating a field, like your phone number, would be a one step process, and only those with "need to know" would ever see this information.
Unfortunately I don't think any of the existing "Social" sites approach this seriously (especially Facebook, which makes a lot of claims in this area).
Here is an idea, free for the taking (patent pending):
A single place where all such information about your career life, social life, dating preferences, hobbies, etc. can be typed in using combinations of free-form fields, check-boxes, menu-lists, etc. Now the hard part, as I've mentioned, is making the access matrix both easy to set up, but complex in how it parcels out information. Not desirable for a potential employer to see your dating preferences, nor for a potential date to see your employment history. It needs to be EASY for you to keep these things straight, not a complex maze as Facebook now has. I personally think that Facebook is working at too many cross purposes to make this even possible.
Orkut, on the other hand, hasn't painted itself into a corner yet by making all sorts of high minded claims while actually implementing something totally different.
For Orkut, it should be possible for me to make both my friends list and my interest groups information invisible to everyone, or only visible to selected individuals. Facebook has addressed this to a limited extent, but then muck it up with their need to generate revenue. Google doesn't have this problem, Orkut is just one of the many products they have to keep you connected to them and viewing ads, they don't live or die by Orkut.
Finally, if all of this information could be collected, and properly segmented and secured, I should be able to do the following things with it:
1: Generate a nicely formatted resume for printing out or e-mailing or posting on a web page (with a revocable key in the last case). There might be a variety of formatting options for standard government resume formats, or more casual forms.
2: Generate a business card summary from above information. There are of course $69 Windows programs to do this item and the one above, but I don't NEED or want to manage such a system on a single PC, especially a Windows one with all the security and database corruption issues it has. Windows has been so bad it has made it positively acceptable to get data off your local PC as fast as possible and onto secure servers somewhere (but NOT a Windows Home Server!).
3. Coupled with online calendar information, photos, blogs, news feeds, address lists, credit card data, and so on, you could also do automated slide shows, photo albums, either online or for printing, holiday card processing...
I can't think of anything you wouldn't want to connect up to this, assuming of course that you have confidence in the security of the application, and as I've mentioned, the online alternatives don't have a very high hurdle to get over to be way ahead of what Windows has established as baseline for local storage.
Supposedly, Google is working on an online health system that would keep (will it be selected, or all?) of your medical history, prescriptions, allergies, and so on that can be rapidly and easily shared with your medical professionals. If this can be done in such a way that people trust it, I see no reason why even less sensitive information that would go into a resume or business card, can't also be stored online, all the time, for those with a "need to know" to get at.
Suddenly this week, Google is kicking ass. Hey copy-cat department over at Microsoft: Time to get back to work. We expect to see these features in Windows Live by Monday!
I've had a Sprint based Razr phone for almost a year and at the other end of the spectrum a Nokia 1100 via Tracfon for a couple, and I've played with an iPhone long enough to know that I can live without one.
I too like the Nokia flashlight feature (mentioned in the Slasdot discussion). I also like that it has a standby life of a month or more (in my experience) and can quickly be turned off and on, unlike the newer phones that must "boot" into a mode that can drive the display even to do something as simple as plug in to recharge.
I love the fact that I can check e-mail browse the web and so forth with the Razr, but the screen is too small to get much out of it (and the iPhone, to me isn't that much of an improvement, I have a Nokia N800 that serves about the same function as the iPhone in that regard).
My main use for a phone is, uh, talking on the phone, and unless I'm in a run down diner on the Interstate in the middle of nowhere, I'm not all that far from being able to check my mail and read the news on a real computer. Like most cell phone users I also own a laptop that does just fine in most Wifi locations.
All that to say, there may be a gPhone that competes with the iPhone, but iPhone users have shown that money isn't the issue with them. They'll stand in line to pay exorbitant prices for an untested product just for the status alone, and I'm sure many of them would do the same even if an equivalent service were available for free.
If the eventual gPhone has none of the features of the iPhone it will serve as a business-model-ending device for pay as you go services as Tracfone T-mobile, etc. Millions of people will buy them for emergency phones in the car, for their kids to take to school, for a spare when the battery on the iPhone dies, and so on. A dirt-cheap (production wise) phone will be almost as big a hit as an "iPhone killer".
Devil in these details: How will ads be presented? In the iPhone format, on the screen of course, possibly annoying the h*** out of you while you are trying to do something else. On an N1100 type device, maybe you would hear a 5 second ad at the start of a call you make, and your callers could be subjected to such a thing too. Tying up a real 10-digit phone number costs money. I don't know how much, but it isn't zero. A totally free phone will have an issue with rapidly using up these numbers for (as mentioned above) phones that get stored in a car and rarely used. Maybe such a device will have a two step process to call. (1) call an 800 number (provided by Google) followed by (2) an internal ID to get to the phone. This could tie in with the GrandCentral acquisition (which I'm already using and impressed with). Finally, an "iPhone Killer" phone that is free, has a large display and other state of the art features is going to be treated like any other free thing: carelessly. It will be subject to all sorts of physical abuse and people will be ordering replacements like they are dim-sum. What could have marginally been an ad-supported device could quickly become a sink-hole for any company who tries it.
So, as usual, I think many of they "analysts" have their heads up their a**es and are either dreaming, or engaging in typical stir up rumors to pump up the stock price tactics. Oh they wouldn't do that would they?
Regardless, when the gPhone does arrive, if it arrives, I hope it has a flashlight too!
From one of the articles:
With the backing of some of the groups opposed to the Google Library project, the Open Content Alliance should experience smooth sailing.
"Remember, being number one is not about being the best, it's about preventing anyone else from being the best."
Keep in mind all the speculation and rumor mongering on all of this is just that. parties are forbiden to disclose what went on in those negotiations, so in a sense, by listening to this stuff: Everything You Know is Wong!
That said, let's jump right in shall we?:
Is it just me or isn't it a little strange to have Microsoft legal in the form of Brad Smith calling around to journalists trying to sway public opinion on all of this? Don't they have other "departments" to do that sort of thing?
Has anyone thought of the possibility that had Microsoft won the bidding then there most certainly WOULD have been an antitrust issue, and without any prompting from Google?
Google is not a convicted monopolist, nor do they dominate search in the same way that Microsoft dominates the desktop. Microsoft would have done everyone a big favor, including their investors, had they voluntarily split the company into separate OS and Applications companies. Still not too late for that move either, but as Microsoft continues to lose mindshare the benefits diminish.
Maybe Microsoft legal meddled a bit too much in the negotiations and now they have a guilty conscience, aka fear of the next re-org. After all, they DID lose the antitrust suit, it was only sloppy sentencing that got them off the hook. And now with everyone re-evaluating DRM, MS selling copies of Windows for $3 there isn't much for MS legal to do other than work out cross licensing issues for patents. Must be hell.
As Eric Schmidt said in *this interview*:
Google promises not to lock users data into their products. To me, that has become the number one feature of any software I use.
While there is always reason to be skeptical when a vendor makes such a promise, we don't have to be skeptical if Microsoft were to make such a promise (which they haven't to my knowledge), we only have to look at their history: With almost every product, with every press release, with every membership on any standards body Microsoft's goal even beyond a desire to have the best products is to make it difficult if not impossible to use competing products side by side with monoliths such as Office and Exchange.
As someone already pointed out, I doubt that the sellers in this case really care what Microsoft's evil intent might have been, but the US Justice department might have, and that would have held up them getting their money.
There is relatively little merit in challenging the Google buy however, so this sale will sail (hehe) through by comparison to what would have happened if MS had won the bidding.
From the website:
"The first business applications fully integrated with Google Apps for your domain. See meetings scheduled with your prospects, support cases open, and use Gmail to track and follow-up on both.
All of this available on-demand, on-site and 100% open source. Find out more.
Launching Q1 2007. "
"When Google Docs and Spreadsheets came along, we toyed with the idea of using the spreadsheet functionality for our Labs schedule, but we were a little bit skittish. Would our super-secret Labs schedule be safe hosted by Google?
In short order, however, we decided that the benefits would be worth whatever small risk there was.
And the benefits have been big. The document is live, of course, so anyone with read or write access and an Internet-connected system can see the most recent changes."
Sure, Gtalk is XMPP-based, but I have been told that the former 2entwiners are working on a cross-platform application to enable the use of Google Apps in an offline state, to be a re-branded form of Google Desktop that will include Gtalk.
"Google (GOOG) is getting serious about taking on Microsoft (MSFT).
Today, it introduces Google Apps Premium Edition, a software suite for companies that provides e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, word processing and spreadsheets. The cost is $50 per worker per year vs. about $500-$600 for Microsoft Office."
Ms. Wettemann noted that a business may spend about $80,000 on a systems administrator to manage e-mail and desktop office software. For the same amount of money, Google Apps allows a business to support 1,600 users, she noted. Simply in terms of staffing, “this may be a better proposition even if Microsoft were free,” Ms. Wettemann said.
And large customers would, in effect, turn over management of their applications to Google, which would host them on its own global network of servers. This model of software as a service, rather than a product, was pioneered by Salesforce.com and has gained momentum over the past three years. Through so-called "service-level agreements," Google would guarantee customers that their business software applications would be up and running around the clock.
One company that decided to make the shift is Prudential Real Estate Affiliates, a Chicago-area franchise that employees 450 sales agents and support staff. The agency has been using Gmail for nearly a year in place of an outsourced e-mail service that performed so poorly that it had to be replaced, said Camden Daily, the group's technology director.
The agency had already worked with Google on the Google Earth and Maps projects, so it used its Google contacts to join the Gmail beta program. "We went ahead and switched, and basically everybody loved the interface ever since," he said.
After months of dancing around with Web versions of e-mail, group calendars, and the like, Google Inc. (GOOG ) is finally about to take a big leap onto Microsoft's turf. Since last August, the search leader has offered a test version of an online office productivity software suite, called Google Apps for Your Domain, that lets companies offload e-mail systems to Google while keeping their own e-mail addresses. Soon, it's expected to add word-processing and spreadsheet services to the suite, which includes an online calendar, chat service, and Web page builder. In coming weeks, Google Apps will turn into a real business as Google begins charging corporations a subscription fee amounting to a few dollars per person per month. "We're dying to use something like this," says Brandeau (Of Disney). He's "on the cusp" of signing a contract with Google.
I'm glad they put that in quotes.
According to figures quoted by Steve Jobs during his keynote, 957 million mobile phones were sold in the U.S. last year. (That compares to 209 million PCs.) Just a 1 percent market share would mean selling around 10 million units, the Apple CEO figures—and that happens to be Apple’s goal for 2008.
While it will be some time before the full effects of the iPhone will be felt, Apple has strong feelings on what its impact will be. “It will do for the phone market what the Mac did for personal computers,” Joswiak said.
More specifically:
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/ofs/cbofs/cbofs.html
Yes, Gates predicted it would be "solved" by now, and so it is.
I get almost none now that I use Gmail instead of crappy Windows software.
Thanks Bill!
Posts
All Comments
