Cote’: “If only Google would charge for GMail and GCal, and thus be accountable when things go wrong, they’d be a viable option for enterprise messaging.”
Why oh why does Google need to charge for GMail and GCal to be accountable when things go wrong?? I just don’t understand that. Am I not already a customer? There’s a new business model in town..
Simon Phipps: “Stewart is spot-on with Flickr’s policy and paradoxically will keep my business by allowing me to leave at any time.”
Absolutely. This post nicely explains something I’ve noticed about my own actions recently, namely why I’ve remained a del.icio.us user even as I’ve become less than enthralled with its new owner: I can export my data at any time from del.icio.us and take it to a competing service. As Simon so eloquently explains, I remain a customer because it’s easy to stop being one. To compete, a rival service needs to not only provide a better product but also make it equally simple to take my business elsewhere, and most service providers don’t seem to be in any hurry to let me do that. Furthermore, the usual reasons for moving data elsewhere, better integration with other providers’ services or more compelling features in a competing service, are less important when the service I’m already using has an open, well-documented API that allows me to do whatever I want with my data without needing to export it.
Boing Boing: “Steward Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr, has promised that the service will allow any of its commercial competitors the API access needed to help customers switch away from Flickr to a competing service; the only gotcha is that these competitors need to offer the same deal to Flickr to help their customers switch, too.”
Yes, this is old news by now, but this is so profound and sensible that I had to link to it anyway.
I was in Russia last week to speak at Interop Moscow 2006. As an American who’s old enough to remember duck and cover, it was an experience indeed. Growing up, the Kremlin would have been the last place I’d ever thought I’d get a chance to see, that is, if I’d thought about such things back then (most kids don’t, and I was no exception, being too busy thinking about important things like baseball and computers). After the conference, I did get that chance to see the Kremlin and other Moscow sights with fellow speakers Jon “maddog” Hall, Federico Biancuzzi, and Raoul Chiesa.
Speaking of being a kid and computers, I also had the opportunity to meet Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer. I was first introduced to computers when my father replaced his typewriter at work with an Apple II in 1981 or so, thought I might find it interesting, and brought it home to show me. Needless to say, it captured my imagination, first with the games, then with the idea that I could make it do my bidding with a little study and a lot of tinkering, and I’ve been hooked ever since. So, as I had a chance to tell the Woz firsthand, I literally do what I do because of his Apple II.
I took plenty of pictures, but as usual, I don’t like most of them. The ones I don’t end up throwing out will be appearing in my Flickr photostream over the next few days.
Charles DiBona: “We think that Google poses a threat to Microsoft long-term by offering an alternate platform for application development. But we also believe that Microsoft recognizes this threat and is investing appropriately in its own operations to counter it.”
Another day, another Google product launch, though this one does more than just lay the groundwork for epic battles to come (most recent example: Google Spreadsheets).
Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that solves an immediate problem that no one to date has adequately solved: It automatically synchronizes browser settings across computers. I’ve been using Foxmarks for a while now to keep my bookmarks synchronized across the various computers I use and have found it incredibly useful. But bookmarks are just a small sliver of the Web 2.0 client problem, and I’ve recently found myself wishing Foxmarks could synchronize saved passwords too, the next maddening bit of client metadata that never seems to be in the right place. Well, I now have my solution, and after using it for a few hours, it seems to work pretty well. My only real complaint is that it only works with one open browser at a time—if you launch a browser on a second computer, it logs you out on the first one. I have multiple computers on my desk with multiple browsers open at any given time, and Foxmarks handled this use case well.
Of course, as with all new Google products, this one exposes as many (or more) new holes in the Google platform as it covers, at least for me. For example, why not synchronize my bookmarks with, well, Google Bookmarks? That way, I could get to my browser bookmarks online, add tags (er, labels), etc., with any changes I make online being reflected back on the client side via the browser synchronization. And why isn’t bookmark functionality available in the Google Toolbar? (Actually, it looks like it is available in the IE version, but not the Firefox version, which makes absolutely no sense to me: Shouldn’t the goal be to abstract away the platform underneath, which implies exposing the exact same feature sets in both versions?) And don’t even get me started on Google Notebook, which otherwise looks promising but is completely unintegrated with Google Bookmarks, not to mention the new thing. While I’m at it, why, oh why, doesn’t Google Notebook utilize the very nice word processing functionality acquired with Writely instead of implementing its own rudimentary text editing support? (Ok, that last one’s further afield, but you get where I’m going here.)
In summary, I now have three ways to bookmark things using the Google platform—the browser (nicely synchronized across computers via the Google cloud), a star (a la Gmail) next to results in my Search History (but not on plain old Google search), and “Note This” on plain old Google search (but not the Search History). Oh, and they all create bookmarks in different places. The end result? Even though I’m primarily a Google customer these days, none of this mess is usable, and I’m still using del.icio.us to bookmark things. That said, I’m not even using del.icio.us as much as I used to because it’s not as well integrated with the browser as it could be, which is presumably why Google is investing in a saner browser environment. (There, we’ve gone full circle now.)
I could go on all day. And, thus far, I’ve only talked about bookmarks. From where I set, this is just an example of a much broader problem for Google: Google has an impressive collection of interesting, but disjoint, features. I’d imagine this is a result of Google’s engineering culture combined with rapid growth. Granted, this approach has served Google pretty well thus far as it pumps new stuff out on a nearly weekly basis while Microsoft struggles to get anything done in less than six years. Of course, Microsoft’s rapidly learning how to be agile, and if there’s one thing Microsoft is good at, it’s assembling disjoint features into platforms. So, heads up, Google: You have a thing or two to learn from Microsoft before that epic battle I referred to earlier begins. They’re certainly learning from you.
Technorati Tags: firefox, google, mozilla, platforms, synchronization, web20
Stephen O’Grady: “[I]nnovation is reflective of the developer, not the development model.”
Robert Love: “In Google’s calculation, the cost of a native port outweighed the benefit of a native [port] vís-a-vís a WINE-fueled Picasa. Is that really unexpected? Our development platform is no shining star. We have two toolkits, poor binary compatibility, and unclear direction. To be sure, vendors such as Novell are devoting increasing effort toward improving the Linux ISV and platform story. But the community must make it a priority as well, from the kernel up through the highest levels of the graphical desktop.”
That’s part of it (and certainly an accurate assessment of the kind of thinking we need as a community to make Linux a better platform). I think there’s another part of it, though, and that’s that operating systems in general are fundamentally uninteresting to Google as platforms in themselves, as well they should be—after all, the web is Google’s platform, and they dominate there, so why should they promote an alternative where they are much weaker?
In my view, the (fat) client bits merely exist to ease the transition from the current, predominantly desktop centric world to a new web centric world where Google naturally thrives. After all, such paradigm shifts are always gradual. There’s the offline question too—if all your data is in the cloud, how do you get to it when you’re not online?—though I suspect over time the browser will provide offline capabilities of some sort, so this is largely a temporary problem too.
So, using Wine in ports not only minimizes the incremental cost of building out a foothold on the client (which, again, is a necessity for Google, given that Google’s biggest competitor is between them and 90% of their customers), but it raises the fat client platform up a level too. In other words, it builds a fat client platform with a consistent look and feel across desktop environments; and with this, the operating system underneath rapidly becomes irrelevant.
The real question is when Google will hook Picasa into a photo sharing service of its own. I already keep my photos in the cloud, and I’d love to organize and edit them in Picasa (Organizr is nice, but nowhere near as nice as a desktop application, and it doesn’t have some basic functionality, like import from camera and red eye repair). Of course, this is just one example of Google having some platform thinking issues of its own, though that’ll have to be a rant for another day.
Picasa is now available for Linux. This is huge news, if you ask me, if only for what it could portend. Imagine Google Pack for Linux, with Firefox and a bundled Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Earth, etc. By taking this approach, Google could build a client metaplatform across Windows and Linux without getting into the OS business directly. Nice answer to the fact that Google’s biggest competitor is between them and 90% of their customers today, all without the headache of being an OS vendor—simply ride atop what’s already out there.
Related news: Google Reaches Agreement to Have Its Software Installed on New Dell Computers.