Google’s product development is brilliant at using its other products to build new ones. The Apps team has just put the optical character recognition from Google’s book scanning project into Google Docs. Upload the scan of a page and have it turned into editable text.
Add that to Google Voice (now launched in the US) and bye bye eFax’s business model.
Add a few tweaks and Google can take on the document management industry.
The FT reports that Google is moving all staff off Windows and onto Macs and Linux machines, to improve security after its Chinese operations were hacked recently.
As the FT points out
Windows is known for being more vulnerable to attacks by hackers and more susceptible to computer viruses than other operating systems. The greater number of attacks on Windows has much to do with its prevalence, which has made it a bigger target for attackers.
But, if you think switching to a Mac is an easy way to improve your security, remember that the kind of attack Google suffered is some way down a hacker’s list. First make sure an outsider can’t fake a password-reset telephone call, or simply guess one of your employees’ passwords…
There’s a lot of chatter about this post by an engineer who’s joining Google from Oracle. He chose Google because its technologies are open and many of Apple’s are closed
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
So don’t buy an iPhone. Millions of others love the way it just works. We have a choice and the intensifying competition between Apple and Google will only improve it. Oh, and Disney’s quite successful too.
Google Apps is a threat to much more than Microsoft Office/Exchange. As Apple’s App Store swept the iPhone into markets as diverse as gaming, satnav and epos, so the new Google Apps Marketplace will drive a wildfire through the corporate software landscape.
If you’re a Google Apps user, go to the Marketplace and choose an App – say Manymoon, a web-based project management application. Click ‘Add it now’, go through a couple of confirmation steps, and it’s available in your Google Apps account, integrated with your email, contacts, calendar, documents, etc. The ‘Standard’ edition of Manymoon is free, so I’ve spent five minutes and £0 to get to the same point of trying it for real with live data.
If you’re using Exchange, prepare to spend months finding and testing a project management system, negotiating the licensing, contracting with a systems integrator to integrate it with your Microsoft Exchange servers, doing the integration, testing and debugging. At the end of this huge time and expense, you start using it with live data – and see how it works.
What’s radical about Google Apps isn’t its existence – e.g. Force.com has been around for a while – it’s the point and click ease. Click, try, buy or chuck – in minutes.
Just like the wildly successful Apps on the iPhone.
For faster mobile browsing, Google search has a great trick – do a search, click the ‘Options’ link under a search result and click ‘Mobile formatted’.
You’ll go to the site through Google’s servers, which strip the page down to the bare essentials – text and featured photos. This makes it much faster than browsing the normal ‘desktop’ version of the web page – and cheaper if you’re abroad. (If the site actually has a mobile-formatted version, Google may send you there instead.)
Here’s the Economist as it normally shows and via Google – which cuts it down to less than 3% of the original size – 30 times faster and cheaper.
Chrome OS is a triumph: from the chaos of the open-source bazaar its champion, Google, is building a tightly-controlled cathedral – one that will shield people from computing horrors such as viruses and crashes by allowing in only the filtered sunlight of web applications.
Chrome OS is made out of open-source software – Linux, WebKit, etc. From these publicly-owned pieces Google is building a very privately-owned computing system. Chrome OS will run only on hardware that Google allows. It will run only the Chrome browser that Google controls. You will access Chrome OS using your Google login details. Other companies and their services can offer users only web-based applications and can’t save any data on Chrome OS machines.
In return for this almost complete control of hardware and software, Chrome OS will avoid incompatibilities between them and allow Google to vet all software for malicious intent.
Microsoft has never had this level of control. Nor has Apple, whose OS X is a more closely controlled system than Windows. The iPhone’s App Store constraints have parallels with Chrome OS and have raised howls from frustrated developers.
But from the point of view of Conosco’s IT support services I like Chrome OS: increasingly you can get anything you want from Alice’s Restaurant web services. If the price of reliability is sticking to the web, let’s keep things simple and get more done.
Why Google is building an operating system. For many users, even today, this could be sufficient – a simple computer that is just an access point for web-based services
After years of rumours about a Google operating system, it’s real: Google Chrome OS is coming next year. In a direct shot at Microsoft’s Windows, Google says
the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
Designed for a web-based world – Gmail, Google Docs, NetSuite, etc – it will be an open source, lightweight operating system, targeted initially at netbooks and based on Linux. Just enough OS to run a browser, but none of the baggage of Windows.
Will Windows 7 have a response? Microsoft have a big announcement scheduled for Monday… But long-term, Google has a strong case: with more and more devices having their own network connections (eg a camera, if you have an iPhone), the old arguments for needing a powerful desktop OS are receding. Go web, young man.
Microsoft’s new web search engine Bing is a bong according to Azeem. His video review finds some amusing grist for the MS conspiracy theorists (shots below) and at Conosco we tend to agree that Bing doesn’t give any reason to switch from the excellent Google. The Bing stats suggest others agree – a result I found much more easily with Google than Bing…
Bing thinks Linux is something to do with Windows
and airbrushes Windows’ blue screen of death problem
Google Apps just won the Valeo account (with 30,000 users) for document storage and editing, with mail and calendars to follow later in the year. That’s a lot of lost revenue for Microsoft Office and Exchange… and MS’s web-based Office applications are still not even in beta.
Google are naturally crowing -
This deployment across Valeo’s distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.
Despite its bugs and shortcomings, Google Apps is using the recession to oust Microsoft with a stripped-down service that does just enough.
At Conosco, we’ve seen a sudden pick-up in new customers since March – and many are startups using Google Apps, which we’re happy to support.
