google

This Business Week article 'Google Steps Into Microsoft's Office' is interesting because it is the first time I have seen a rather large corporate entity (Pixar/Disney) express an interest in moving to a non-Microsoft, Web-based platform like Google Apps for your Domain. The other interesting point to note is published user-base of Microsoft Office Live which is sitting at 250,000 businesses, quite a respectable number for a new, non-free service.

I have been a user of Google Apps for your Domain for a while now on a number of domains and have got a few other well entrenched in-house email fans to sign up as well. By far and away the best things about it has been the spam protection and the fact that within an evening you can have a fully functioning email and calendar service up and running with no fuss at all. It has been slightly disappointing that the applications list has not grown to cover the Docs and Spreadsheets products already and many of the new GMail features such as the very handy retrieve mail service or increased storage sizes have not become available to Apps users sooner.

This Tuesday the 6th of February Chris DiBona from Google will be in Wellington to talk open source. I am organising a meet-up and dinner with him at a local Wellington restaurant. There will be people from a wide variety of backgrounds there (government, small business, academic) and if you would like to come along please contact me and I will send you more details. I only hope the weather is as good next Tuesday as it was yesterday...

When you think of Google you think search but a consequence of all of those searches is some very useful trends. This is where Google Trends comes into play. With it you can enter a few different terms (separated by commas) and then the tool will return a graph of the number of search hits for each term over the last few years. Not only that you can break down the search to look at from where people are searching for these terms. I did a quick trend analysis of C#, Java, PHP and Ruby and the results are pretty interesting, especially the fact that six of the top ten cities searching for these terms are in India (although in hindsight it is hardly surprising).

There has been rumblings about software as a service and Web 2.0 revolutionising the way people work with their computers and data but very little to really illustrate this point. Whilst the average person is comfortable with having their email and chat hosted by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo the idea of businesses trusting third parties with hosting their software and data is a foreign one.

Companies like Google, SalesForce.com and now Zoho are out to change this attitude with a direct push at the business marketplace. You know an I.T. concept has momentum when it has its own conference, and now with the Office 2.0 Conference there is a showcase for business orientated, software as a service applications. TechCrunch has been doing a very good job covering the new applications released during this conference. Zoho seems very interesting from a software capability perspective although successfully marketing this service within the industry as it stands today will no doubt be difficult. However it is probably more likely that Zoho is concentrating on their application feature-set with an end-game of being purchased by a larger company (Yahoo, AOL). This larger company will then rebrand Zoho and use it to compete with Google's emerging online office suite and Microsoft Office Live.

YouTube provides online video quickly when you want it and those related video links are just addictive. My favourites are World of Warcraft clips and comedian videos like Bill Hicks. If you have not had your head stuck in the sand over the last few days you would have heard Google has purchased YouTube, or more precisely they have given the owners a tonne of Google stock ($1.65 billion worth) and not a single real dollar changed hands. Hopefully this purchase by Google provides a search speed increase, at the moment searching for videos is often very slow when compared to just browsing which is always very snappy.

Probably the most interesting reaction to this came from Jason Calacanis who was all for the deal which is quite unlike his tone on the Gillmor Gang of late. The most unsurprising reaction was from Mark Cuban who stuck to his guns by saying YouTube is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen and bad news for any future owner.

I was listening to the Gillmor Gang yesterday and the guest was Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc (now part of AOL). He put forward the most logical argument for Google bringing out an operating system I have heard that actually sounded like it could be a success. He believed Google would release a free Linux-based operating system that would be distributed pre-installed on Dell and HP computers. Not only would the operating system be free but it would make extensive use of AdSense in order to deliver targeted advertisements in some integrated manner to users. A good portion of this income would be shared with the PC manufacturers (up to 80%), which would provide significant incentive to ship and support Google OS instead of Windows. Also this post-sale income stream would allow Dell and HP to significantly lower their retail prices on the basis that a good portion of their income would occur post-sale.

Thomas Fuchs, the guy behind script.aculo.us recently did a presentation in San Francisco about AJAX that looked pretty interesting. He has is slide show online in PDF format here. Associated notes made during the presentation have been put online by the guys at Ajaxian.