UnixPoet

Office 2007 is nice. I appreciate the effort MS put into designing the new ribbon interface and like it.

I’ve only used Outlook so far, just explored the others. Groove is the roughest round the edges and not as in keeping with the rest of the Office. Having said that, the idea behind Groove is good even if the execution is lacking.

Outlook: junk email detection is very good, much better than Entourage which is what I use on the Mac (I know, I should Mail). Nice clean interface. RSS support is passable; won’t be changing from Google Reader anytime soon.

What instantly and immediately bugged me: a yellow bar urging me to install Instant Search aka Windows Desktop Search. I know Microsoft would really love it if people installed Windows Desktop Search but I have no intention switching away from Google Desktop.

To switch off that annoying prompt: Tools -> Options. Click on the “Other” tab, then click the “Advanced Options” button and unmark the “Annoy user into installing Windows Desktop” er… actually its the “Show prompts to enable Instant Search”.

I do not think that Google has an Office in mind. At all.

First off, Writely, even a souped up version full of Google steriods, will still remain the Wordpad to the Visual Studio that is Office. Google is not dumb enough to do a full frontal on Microsoft Office - the way to beat Office is to make it irrelevant. And Writely does not really even to begin to do that.

What Google above all is an advertising company selling targeted ads. It needs to know its users in detail - the more it knows the better. And what better way to learn about someone then looking at their email, the IM, the news they are interested, the blogs they read, and the documents they write?

Google will offer Writely and GDrive so that it has more info to analyse about the users; the aim is to not to kill Office - that’s just a nice bonus. Google does not care if you use Office Word - but it does care that you keep it on GDrive.

Indeed, in the grander scheme of things, the more important announcement from Google is not Writely but GDrive.

Is it a wonder that the latest Google Desktop (which is great btw) saves documents on Google servers? Indeed it fits in nicely with my hypothesis

Evolution of industry dynamics:
- In the 90’s Sun hyped Java.
- percieving a threat Microsoft backed Flash
- Flash shipped with IE, which means
- that nearly all PCs today run Windows, which comes bundled with IE, which includes Flash.
- Adobe bought out Macromedia, the developers of Flash, as they saw it a good fit with the other applications in their lineup
- Google buys Adobe. Instantly can bundle Google Desktop Search with Adobe Reader and Flash. That would be a lot of installs for Google.

And all because back in the day MS used its clout to back a competing technology against a percieved threat which never materialized. Oh what a tangled web we weave…

Remember, you heard it here first

sort of. A sign in page comes up but even after giving it my (correct) password it just takes me back to the sign in page.

Interesting post by Jonathan Schwartz (COO of Sun):

“The two features every single user needs are: Save, and Open. So wouldn’t it be interesting if rather than exploring your local file system on your local PC, the Save and Open panels simply looked to a network account on Sun’s Grid? Shareable like any of the mainstream photo services are today? Or how about saving to that 2.5Gb allowance Google gave you in your GMail account? And wouldn’t it be great if you could save to ODF, or translate to Microsoft Word, or generate a podcast or mp3 file - on the fly? From within any app?”

The game plan as I see it: you save your document to base.google.com which kindly hosts it for you for free. Google will most certainly index it - for two reasons: for search purposes but also to learn more about you. A nice addition to the just hosting the document would be a Writerly style offering which allows you to edit the documents you upload. The aim is not to supplant Word, which is hard to do anyway, but to extend it a little. I don’t think Google actually aims to kill Office; they just want to peek at the files you create using it.

And then? Then they sell you even more targeted advertising.

Google already give out freebies to developers who write plugins Google Desktop Search. I wonder if they should offer similar incentives to developers who extend their applications to save to base.google.com.

Microsoft just relaunched some warmed over bits of MSN sporting a new AJAX UI. The design is pleasing and overall the site is well executed. MS may have been thinking about it for some time, but I’m sure Google helped concentrate minds

From this point onwards, Google’s job just got harder, and it will be increasingly hard to make headway in gmail, talk and news usage. I have long feared that Google is more fragile than it appears. Technical improvements are great but they come at an increasingly greater cost until the next paradigm. And the financials are ephemeral - the billions have come quickly, and could evaporate just as quickly. At this point, all Microsoft has to do is to copy Google, while relying on the usual cash cows. Google doesn’t have this luxury. I think that Google declared war too early - a touch of hubris I suspect. My fear is that 5 years from now Google will have faded from view, with most using IE and live/msn. Another win for One Microsoft Way. Ah well.

Incidentally, I don’t see the same happening to Yahoo, which was always more of a portal player then Google. Its popularity as a search engine will be eclipsed by msn but it will still be a destination for all the celeb gossip / lifestyle fodder.

The Google killers are here and here.

Yahoo thinks Google is the enemy. Yahoo is envious of Google coz, you know, Google is cool. Which it is. And Yahoo isn’t so, along with the other envious geek, decides to gang up on Google. Oh dear!

Google and Yahoo have around 35% and 30% of the search market with Microsoft struggling behind at 15%. Teaming up with MS may seem good at first, after all, getting those 35% would be nice. What Yahoo seems to have forgotten is that Microsoft is 95% on the desktop and that if Microsoft can kill Google, it can kill Yahoo just as easily. In other words, the long term strategic threat is not from Google at all, but from Microsoft. Microsoft can’t afford to let anyone else dominate search.

Yahoo should have allied with Google against Microsoft in the IM space and in whichever space is reasonable. Yahoo and Google need to build up momentum against Redmond because otherwise they will never be truly secure.