Tag: technology

Wal-Mart selling Google PCs? I doubt it!

A speculative article by the LA Times suggested that Google will “will unveil its own low-price personal computer” as soon as Friday and has been in “negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.”. First this article was picked up by Slashdot and then The Register and I believe has been blown completely out of proportion.

The original Los Angeles Times article was one of those speculative lists of what will happen in 2006 by “analysts”. The Google PC prediction sat alongside Microsoft buying Ask Jeeves, Expedia, and Ticketmaster and Steve Jobs becoming a Disney Chairman – yet the Register reports it almost as fact.

Ignoring the dubious sources for a moment here, I just don’t think Google would do this. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if Google branded a distribution of GNU/Linux (it would almost certainly be Linux derivative) and sold cheap PCs without the Microsoft tax, finally distributing their changes to Open Source software instead of keeping them to themselves to provide services. Google is a company full of suprises – but I don’t think it’s their style. Why bother? Their services are cross platform and independent of the OS, their main environment is the web browser. Google’s main strengths are in their clustered supercomputer as a general platform for software as a service, they have no need to provide desktop PCs to access their services because they’re already out there.

I believe Google are more interested in rendering the traditional Desktop paradigm obsolete than making their own desktop OS. If they released hardware for the home it is more likely to be a derivative of their business search appliance for multimedia or very cheap little boxes in a cluster or mesh which glue the digital home together and I doubt very much they’d call it a PC, it would be something completely different to the Personal Computers we know today.

Just for reference, I don’t believe in the whole idea of them making a web-based OpenOffice either, it’s simply too bloated. If Google were to create an office suite it would be minimalist, lightweight and completely different to its desktop counterparts with focus on ubiquitous access, collaboration and open standards.

There’s scope for Google to want to put hardware in people’s homes in the future, the main crux of the software as a service model taking over from desktop applications is that you simply can’t buy latency, and for some applications where the speed of light (fibre) just isn’t fast enough, this is going to cause problems. Putting Google hardware in peoples houses creates a great deal of new opportunities. Just not now, and not like this.

I can see where people are coming from. Google has ties with Sun and OpenOffice, they’ve released a range of desktop applications recently, they’re making aggressive moves towards Microsoft and have put desktop PCs in a London airport for usability testing. Due to 20% time projects by staff and a certain amount of freedom for the next couple of years due to being flushed with money from the IPO – they seem to be going off on all sorts of tangents leading people to believe they have a masterplan for something big. I just think that Google have a long way to go with their web services before they’re ready for a move like this.

I have to admit, part of my dismissive argument is due to the fact that if on Friday Google *do* announce that they’re selling PCs through Wal-Mart, it has a lot of implications for my Krell experiment. We’ll wait and see.

Edit: Just noticed that the BBC picked it up too.

Wiki Spam, Flock

Wiki Spam

Today I had my first wiki spam. Wasn’t much, just rolled back a couple of pages and blocked the IP address with reason set to “Spamming Scum”. This is becoming a serious problem for a lot of groups that I know and while the “with enough eyes all bugs are shallow” theory does generally stand up, it doesn’t stop it being frustrating. I’m generally against requiring registration for things that are supposed to be public and I wish there was a better solution, I’ve been thinking more about a “web of trust”.

Flock
Hailed by many as the first browser for “Web 2.0” (really just a buzz word for hype itself), I tried the preview of Flock today. I have to say I’m not really sure what they’re doing that’s innovative here. I think the key thing is that they’ve recognised the potential of grouping together web applications, but realistically they’re not doing anything that you couldn’t already do with Firefox extensions and plugins – it’s just they’ve packaged it as a product. The only advantage I can see is tighting up the integration between web services slightly.

To me the whole point of web services as opposed to packages is that features are added without the user upgrading and you connect to them, you don’t install them. Is providing a software package to access web services really the way to go? Surely a better approach would be a web service to access web services. Hint, hint.

Google seem to be pushing the idea of a desktop application to access web services too with taking some unusually forward steps to promote their Google Toolbar. There’s also the Google Desktop and Google Earth, but from reading a recent interview with an employee, the latter is probably just to fill in the gap until they can figure out how to implement that monster in a web interface.

Tim hits the nail on the head

In my last post I mentioned that I’ve been “struggling to articulate the things in my head into words”. Well, it seems for a large chunk of it I no longer have to. On 30th September Tim O’Reilly published an article entitled “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software“. Although I wouldn’t refer to it as “Web 2.0” because it’s more just the web evolving into something else slowly rather than a new version as such (which Tim actually hints at himself), it covers a large chunk of what I’ve been thinking about recently in terms of the web’s next step in building the “Information Age”.

From the article:

1) Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
2) Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
3) Trusting users as co-developers
4) Harnessing collective intelligence
5) Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
6) Software above the level of a single device
7) Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Although at least from an engineering perspective I’m still not convinced the web is the right platform for all this, it is evolving and it’s likely better to let the web become something new rather than trying to create something new from scratch simply because it’s already out there, everywhere. I believe that this list of seven identifiable trends ultimately set the scene for the convergence of computing, communications and media in a really big way and for the ideas I’m working on to come to fruition. My ideas are still very underdeveloped but at least I have something to aim at.

And now back to my ordinary everyday life, I have to make something to eat.

But first, while I’m in a wild, predictive mood… Look out for a Google Calendar, iPod Video (and another new iPod of some variety by the end of next week), eventually a handheld device which is basically just a lot of storage and a big display with approximately one button and *lots* of connectivity, a replacement for the traditional office suite, the death of 3G by 2009 and the old-school-set-in-their-ways software and media industries getting very scared. OK I’m done with speculation now.