After conquering the search realm, what’s next for this Mountain View-based maverick? A Google OS? It may take a while before we see this but all signs point to Google’s desire to own the desktop. You can also call it the final showdown with Microsoft.
We’ve seen the wars they’ve fought (example: Google vs. MSN Search, Gmail vs. Hotmail, Google Talk vs. MSN Messenger) and the wars they have yet to fight (example: Google Browser vs. Internet Explorer); all hint at an imminent battle for control of the desktop with Microsoft. Charles H. Ferguson gives an excellent outline of the battlefield in his What’s Next for Google article in TechnologyReview.com.
Why are these two destined to fight to the death? Kevin Kelleher in his Google vs Gates article in Wired Magazine gives us a the best clue so far:
For all their differences, the two companies have a lot in common. Microsoft looks at Google and sees its own past, full of promise. Google looks at Microsoft and sees the future – a swaggering company that dominates the tech landscape. It’s a classic battle between youth and experience or, as Google likes to believe, good and evil.
Now does that not sound like Star Wars?
10 comments
I have also read this article called “Revenge of the Nerds”.
It tackles more about Goole and Yahoo hiring hundreds of Superstars from the Valley including ones from Microsoft, EBAY, Amazon SUN and more.
That time, I dont have a hint that Google is planning for an OS. Well, untill now. 😉
it might be as well as evil vs. evil? Google seems to be MSish in its expansion style.
Google’s turning to be the second most-hated company after MS in Silicon Valley.
Additional read: GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS?
Its so uso to be a Google fanboy nowadays, that I’d really want to jump ship and go somewhere else.
IMHO, GoogleOS is pure speculation, which might not be revealed for many months/years to come. People are just searching for another giant OS that has a messianic factor over Windows. But hey, we already have it: GNU/Linux. I think if Google has to build a new OS, it’ll be BSD or Linux based.
Is that how easy to predict now? Remember Google likes to play guessing games with tech people. I hate to do this but I’ll have my guess anyway. The next market Google will take is gaming. That’s where the money is in the future. It is always after where the money is. Another of my wild guess.
nice guess. but they’ll face MS in that feild too. Cool.
i cant wait to type games.google.com on my browser.
Kates/St. Ellar, Xbox vs….Google PSX (ps2 + xbox hehe)
Richard, evil vs. evil….I like that hehe 🙂
Rain, nice find. WebOS, browsers, webservers…galing. tapos Flash yung UI! 🙂
Marc: Ayoko ng Flash. AJAX na lang!!!
Richard: For some reason, I still don’t see how Open Source *nix systems will ever gain any kind of dominance on desktop systems any time soon. In terms of usability for the majority of the end users of the world most flavors of *nix-based OSs are simply not good enough. MacOS, Xandros, and some other proprietary versions are some exceptions. OSS still has the developers-developing-for-developers attitude that won’t help them, and while KDE and Gnome are trying their best, it’s still obviously not enough.
But if anyone was to have the guts to create “a whole new killer OS”, I would bet on it being *nix-based. (Of course, I’m still counting on http://haiku-os.org/ to pull through and show the world that there’s more to OSs than MS and *nix.)
Here’s another good read on the whole GooOS story…
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/3640
I think this pretty much captures the business case and the strategy for Google’s desktop takeover ambitions.