Fighting for icon space on the desktop is so 2001. The new frontier on a virgin PC is the browser, and Internet companies like Google are jostling for space on the browsers of new PCs. Dell and Google are evaluating a partnership in which the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search and a Google-designed Dell home page are included on new Dell PCs, a Dell representative confirmed.
Well, like I stated in a comment a few stories back (about sidebars), it appears Google is taking the threat of Windows Live being integrated into Vista seriously, and is preparing to take the fight onto Microsoft’s home turf, the desktop. This is obvious by them pushing Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar (both through Google Pack and through Adsense), as well as numerous other Google tools.
Google has a massive war chest (8 billion currently) to fight this war, whereas even though Microsoft has tons more money, they have to divvy that money up between numerous different divisions of Microsoft. Google’s technology trounces Microsoft’s in almost every way imaginable. Google has also begun integrating GTalk into Gmail in order to increase its user-base, taking on MSN Messenger more directly. Now if only Google would take away the invite only status of Gmail, they may be able to increase Gtalk’s user-base more than the pathetic 900,000 users it sits at right now.
The only thing I think Google should do is integrate Google Desktop Extreme into Google Desktop to give it a prettier interface than it currently has. Then work out deals with PC manufacturers to ship it with current Windows XP computers. This way people will become accustomed to it, and use it over Microsoft’s future search technologies being integrated into Vista. (Don’t even get me started on MSN desktop search for XP, what a piece of crap).
All in all, the search landscape is going to get pretty interesting over the next few years. I personally don’t think Windows Live and its integration with Vista is going to hurt Google. IE6 already has MSN as the default search engine and home page, yet most people still use Google.
Google has also been pretty smart with helping other projects.
They are not foolish enough to try and make money directly competing with Microsoft’s established money makers, but they do help out other people who are. This way Google is creating a community of different people and companies that are competing with Microsoft’s different project without having to compete directly themselves. The summer of code is a good example of this.
Helping out projects like gnome or open office.org is not a great expense to Google and it keeps Microsoft busy so that fewer resources get allocated to crushing Google.
Very rarely do toolbars make sense and not become annoying. I think they take up too much space, but if its limited to just one catch all toolbar then its good. Its when people have the google toolbar, yahoo toolbar, and the spyware bar all loaded that really annoys me. Can’t say I’m crazy about all the extra software that gets loaded on a Dell either, even if it is soon to be Google.
I understand Google is paying Dell “a bit” of money to get their products installed in millions of PCs. Who will warn Dell’s users about their loss of privacy?. Is it going to be implicit in the EULA?. Will they have two different prices for new PCs, cheap, Google hypercharged and subsidized or more expensive but without the “features”?. Oh, maybe all the money goes to Dell instead of the users who will become new Google “slaves”.
Come on, Google is not giving anything for “free”, do we really want it or can we live with not so good tools such as Beagle?; tools without cookies, storing your searches, targeting you with ads, scanning your e-mail…
People who know the truth can choose. My concern is most people who buy a PC from Dell have no idea about the repercusions. But the funny thing is in general, people are very concerned with their privacy, nobody likes a neighbor peeking through their window. What would happen if they knew?.
I doubt people really care if some random computer program scans your stuff. I have asked my mom and grandparents about this before, and they said unless Google has actual physical people sitting there and reading your private information, they couldn’t care less.
Well people from OSNews or Slashdot may care, your average computer user who uses services such as Hotmail doesn’t care.
Actually, the exact response I got from my Grandpa was “If I ever plan on killing anyone, I just won’t mention it on Yahoo! Mail (he hasn’t switched yet…I’m still working on him) and I’ll be fine”
… Are the bane of man.
No 3rd-party toolbar has ever touched my desktop, and I never plan on letting it happen in the future. I’m sure many of you would agree with me here.
I use the Google Toolbar for Firefox. It saves me a lot of time when a lot of Google services I use are a click away. Plus, the ability to spell check forms I fill out online with Google Toolbar spell-check is a real time saver.
>No 3rd-party toolbar has ever touched my desktop,
>and I never plan on letting it happen in the future.
>I’m sure many of you would agree with me here.
Never. Ever.
Yea, toolbars are pretty annoying in and of themselves.
I wish that they would include Firefox as well. It makes sense that they would because IE is just going to more deeply integrate MSN’s service, and it would be a great boost to open source to have Firefox included with all of Dell’s desktops.
Who knows, they may plan on doing this. Google has started promoting Firefox pretty heavily (through their adsense program, they will pay you a dollar for every person whom you manage to get to download Firefox + Google Toolbar). They also bundle Firefox with their toolbar as a part of Google Pack.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was part of the deal.
They do: http://blakeross.com/2005/12/19/firefox-shipping-on-dell-uk/
Google are getting pretty scary these days. Apart from logging searches to IP address, connecting Google Mail accounts with other Google services (search engine/Groups/etc), scanning your email to insure you get the right kind of advertising, changing the T&Cs of Google Talk so that it logs all your conversations (although there seems to be an opt out) and perhaps other things we might not be aware of, I wonder how much information they’re going to be logging from everyone’s computer activities by having their toolbars everywhere?
this data could become a terrible instrument in the wrong hands.
“other things we might not be aware of”
Only what’s on the privacy policy they can log, otherwise they can be sued into hell. It’s not what they log which is the biggest issue, it’s how that data is mapped.
an IP address alone is pretty much useless, Google are not going to try ‘splot your machine. Instead they can guage Google usage across countries, across time. They can watch usage go up over time, see what times of the day are the busiest, what countries/ISPs click which adverts and target accordingly, see a physical spread across subnets of a certain new keyword as more people search for it, determine Google usage per ISP to monitor bundling deals, calculate search terms that tend to be used more in a certain geographical location and millions more things.
The power of data is not what you collect, but what you mine out of it. (Wall*Mart brag about having data-stores larger than the Internet itself, but still they haven’t a clue).
Ever since finding out about spyware/adware and toolbars I never trusted toolbars. If your looking for something how hard is it to click on home page, assume your home page is MSN.com, yahoo.com, google.com, etc. then typing what your looking for. The odd thing is that if you have a browser that displays all your bookmarks at a quick glance then you can goto all of your search engine to fine thing.
Google is getting big, people are getting concerned. I’m getting more and more convinced every day that at some point we will have a similar “war” with Google as is currently going on with MS. I’m also quite sure it’ll be the same people in that war (*Nix users that is).
However, what really bothers me is that I’m seriously concerned by the path Google is walking on, but I simply can’t refuse to acknowledge the quality of their offers.
Gmail is my personal favourite. How can it be that Gmail has now been around for a couple of months or is it even a year now (it probably is) and still no one has actually developed technology which can compete with it. Gmail is fast, user friendly, elegant and simply a piece of art. As a webmail service, I haven’t seen anything that can by far compete with the service. Not to mention that it’s free for usage and gives you incredible 2gb of space. Can someone point me to any software doing the same?????
I hope people start learning from Google in the OSS world and start to make as brilliant stuff as Google do, so I can actually download and use the stuff without having to worry about integrity issues rising from the big G camp… will that ever happen?
Gmail has been around for close to two years (it was released in April, 2004). And they currently offer 2.7GB of storage, not 2GB, and it goes up a MB approximately every 3 days. If you go to http://www.gmail.com without being signed into Google, you can watch the storage going up in real time.
Is this not bundling? The same thing Microsoft got in trouble for? Either way its just more crap to delete from the default Dell install all I need from them is drivers for the OS that’s it!
Why is it so hard to understand that bundling is not necessarily illegal. Microsoft was an exception because they had/have a desktop monopoly. Different rules apply when you are a monopoly as opposed to when you are not a monopoly.
We got 4 new Optiplexes in at work for a client and they all had Google Desktop installed on them. In a way it was kinda nice, but then again, I used to like Dell because they didn’t load their systems up with 3rd party software. I’m not sure how I feel about this one, though…
Edited 2006-02-09 08:12