Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Is Google Wave a flop?

February 10th, 2010

Antonio Lupetti has an interesting post over on WoorkUp asking readers wether or not Google Wave is a flop. In my opinion the service is most definately a flop.

I was pretty excited to try Google Wave when it was initialy announced. After getting an early invitation I quickly realized that it was never going to take off as a public service. It’s just too complicated for normal users and I suspect a lot of them abandon it before ever even putting it use.

I don’t really see how Google can salvage it either. Maybe the service fails because they tried to reinvent something that worked pretty well to begin with. Maybe if they look at what they ended up building, a collaboration tool, and begin to think of it from that perspective then they can turn the service into something that becomes more popular.

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Posted in Social Networking, Web, Web 2.0 |

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YouTube rolls out HTML5 video

January 29th, 2010

This news is about a week old but I really felt it was worth sharing. YouTube has started testing an HTML5 beta that delivers their video content in h.264 instead of Flash.

If you are using a supported browser, like Apple’s Safari or Google’s Chrome, then you can enter the beta here.

Personally I’m very much in favor of HTML5 replacing Flash. I never liked Flash, not when it was being used in web design and not now that it’s found a second life delivering video content. So video content moving into a standard compliant setup would make me really happy. If been using the HTML5 beta on YouTube for about a week now and I haven’t seen any difference or experienced any problems, it works perfectly.

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Posted in Web, Web 2.0 |

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The Google phone is coming

December 13th, 2009

Pretty interesting turn of events, it seems that the rumored Google phone is true and coming in January. According to what I’ve read it will be a GSM phone that will be sold unlocked and without a carrier, in terms of form and features and appearances it’s very much inline with the iPhone.

I found this to be pretty surprising, I saw the battle between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android playing out much the way the battle between Apple and Microsoft played out in the 80’s. With Google thriving by licensing out it’s software to all hardware manufactures and Apple ultimately being held back by it’s business model of building both hardware and software. Does Google want to have it’s cake and eat it too?

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Posted in Computers & Gadgets, The Joy Of Tech |

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Google reveals Chrome OS

November 20th, 2009

Yesterday Google revealed their upcoming web based Chrome OS to the world. This video explains the OS in layman’s terms, while the video bellow shows an early developer version of the actual OS in action.

I have to say that I rather like what Google is putting forward here. Computers have changes a lot in terms of appearance since the 90’s but not at all in terms of operating system and how it’s designed to be used. I think we are reaching a point where the average consumer is aware of what they need from a computer, and for most people it’s not much. Go online, send emails, social network, edit the occassional office file.

Under that assumption I think Google’s plans for Chrome OS make a lot of sense. It’s not geared for everyone, but I do think it’s geared for and tries to address the needs of the average user.

I’m definately interested in seeing how this develops and how some of the grey areas get ironed out. One big hurdle I can think of is dealing with people’s music which has to come to live on the computer. It’s one aspect of people’s digital lives that hasn’t moved into the cloud. Streaming services like Spotify could really benefit from this OS, but I don’t see how they wil deal with the average person with all their music stored as MP3 files. That’s one area where a middle ground between the cloud and local storage needs to be found or new services, like Spotify, need to take off and become the norm.

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Posted in Computers & Gadgets, The Joy Of Tech |

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Google preps the nails for Microsoft’s coffin

July 8th, 2009

Google ChromeThis morning news leaked of an upcoming Google operating system based on their Chrome web browser to be used on cheap netbooks. When I first started this blog I made a post about how a Google operating system could create turning point in Windows dominance, and I still believe in that. I find it interesting how things have come full circle. When Microsoft started out as a company it’s primary source of revenue was their office suites. So when they went head to head with IBM, they won the war because they were able to sell cheap licenses of Windows to every PC manufacturer. At that point it was a sound business strategy because it lead into sales of their Office products where they made the real money. In the 90’s Microsoft, in part due to their position, changed the way they did business and became heavily reliant on charging money to PC manufacturers for licensing their Windows operating system.

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Posted in Computers & Gadgets, The Joy Of Tech |

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