Google is Microsoft’s traitor
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Microsoft ruled once. No doubt. Microsoft still rules, for almost all common people know nothing more than Windows OS. After
all these years of Microsoft’s monopoly, there appears a cunning fox called Google. Will Google replace Microsoft? My gut feeling says that the day is on the cards.
We knew Google to be the search engine (repeat: THE search engine). It is not ‘I searched the net …’ anymore, but it is ‘I googled …’. That is a revolution with influence level of 1 followed by hundred zeros. Google didn’t stop there. It allowed us to turn earth from east to west using the Google earth. And it also crept into the desktop user’s daily clicking domain with a number of desktop applications like Picasa, desktop search, Google toolbar, Google talk and much more. The fact that Microsoft treats Google as its competitor is clear when we see the MS-Word’s spell checker doesn’t recognize the word ‘Google’! But, Google cannot go unrecognized. It is making its presence felt.
The latest venture of Google has been the online spreadsheets and documents. This is where it looks at bringing down the Microsoft. Certainly Microsoft’s office package is used almost everywhere. But users may think twice about buying a package, when one is available online and that too for free of cost. Yes, you have to buy Microsoft office. It doesn’t even come along with the operating system. If this surprises you, you are then using a pirated version of the MS Office and have been prevalent amongst us for years in this fashion. When a legal and free online document editor is available, there should be a logical tendency to shift for it. Of course, not all the features are available with the google’s version, but it does have all the basic features like indenting, formatting, etc. Don’t be surprised if almost all MS-Word’s features come into Google’s doc editors in the future; currently they are just in the Beta stage.
Google’s strength
The strength of Google is the pace at which it brings in the updates. When I started using Google talk the chat window did not have any buttons, now it has a ‘Call’ button, a ‘Send Scrap’ button, ‘Send voicemail’ button, etc. And I did not know when the came in! And the second thing about Google is its innovative ideas. Not many would have thought of E-mails as conversations. All its products are fast, damn user friendly and have ingredients to become an instant hit.
Google doesn’t have a platform to run on. Its desktop applications will mostly run on Microsoft (i.e. the Windows)!! It appears like it will run on top of Microsoft and stay on top of Microsoft in business. Isn’t that the work of a traitor?!! It is not just the operating system but there are other small applications required by desktop users. The consumers are not just big organizations that buy servers and big software packages. In fact the majority of them are the ones who would wish to do something like convert his videos in Ipod format and documents in PDF format. A Microsoft application cannot do that. But Google videos and Google docs can. This is the area where Microsoft is losing out to Google – small applications / web tools for a common user.
Tomorrow …
Don’t be surprised if you are doing more Googling than Microsofting. One visible product missing from Google is a web browser. I am sure it is working on building one, given that a beta version of a text browser is already out. All the links that I frequently browse get into my ‘Favorites’ of IE. That includes couple of portals we use in our office. Calling them as ‘Favorites’ would only be a paradox! Only Google can understand such needs of a common man. So, expecting a Google browser soon, that has more logic in it! …. and many more of its wonderful products.
-Vinayak
(Please do RRC)
A known list of Google desktop/web tools:
1) The obvious Search engine – www.google.com
2) Gmail – Email with storage space you can never fill (>2GB)
3) Picasa – also available as a web tool – to manage photos and images
4) Desktop search
5) Google earth
6) Docs and Spreadsheets on the web
7) Google notebooks (For storing text files – www.google.com/notebooks )
8) Uploading Videos - http://video.google.com
9) Web page creator (web tool) – http://www.googlepages.com
10) Google toolbar – toolbar for IE (Internet Explorer) that can send web pages through Email, Maintain online bookmarks and access them from anywhere, etc.
11) Google talk – the chat tool
12) Few Google affiliates – Blogger and Orkut
I use all of these. Try them ... you will like them. It makes life a lot easier.
Disclaimer: I am neither a fan of Microsoft nor against Microsoft