Part IV: Tech History, Google, and Picasa
(See yesterday's post for the beginning of this story...)
Now Google is making a serious play to become the next Microsoft. They take the good ideas, take the good jargon, take the good marketing, and goddammit, they ship it!. And consequently, they're building a real hardware/OS-independent platform that rocks!
First, it was the Search Engine -- recently upgraded to be more human-like. Then it was Online E-mail that actually worked -- and thus was in immense demand. They led the way in the blogging world and in news aggregation. Then they stretched out with a variety of other services, culminating in the recent acquisition of Picasa, which really brings the platform play full circle.
Why does Picasa matter? Because finally, Google is making a serious investment in a technological field that has until now been dominated by desktop players.
Of course, as I previously observed, Google is actually using good ideas that have been created in a scattershot fashion elsewhere on the Net. For example, rather than requiring users to import individual photos from their drives, the Picasa software automatically detects them as they are added — whether sent via e-mail or transferred from a digital camera. This part rocks.
And furthermore, just like in GMail, Picasa gets rid of the antiquated MS file names and folder conventions. This is really where the rubber hits the road: when you change the paradigm, you control the user expected experience. If Google's attempt to modify user behavior works, then MS and other desktop companies will be forced to change their approach to this kind of software.
And if they do so -- if they modify local search or folder conventions -- then Google has basically won. They're driving the innovation. Now that doesn't mean that Microsoft or Adobe couldn't still sneak up and steal the market, but they would have to knock off the market leader.
And we all saw how MS almost didn't do it with Netscape, and what it cost MS to do it. Furthermore, the scary part (to MS at least) is that Picasa only runs on Windows -- it's directly targeted at the MS platform.
The next Net battle has been underway for awhile; we're only realizing just now how far ahead some of the recent innovators (like Google) really are.
Now Google is making a serious play to become the next Microsoft. They take the good ideas, take the good jargon, take the good marketing, and goddammit, they ship it!. And consequently, they're building a real hardware/OS-independent platform that rocks!
First, it was the Search Engine -- recently upgraded to be more human-like. Then it was Online E-mail that actually worked -- and thus was in immense demand. They led the way in the blogging world and in news aggregation. Then they stretched out with a variety of other services, culminating in the recent acquisition of Picasa, which really brings the platform play full circle.
Why does Picasa matter? Because finally, Google is making a serious investment in a technological field that has until now been dominated by desktop players.
Of course, as I previously observed, Google is actually using good ideas that have been created in a scattershot fashion elsewhere on the Net. For example, rather than requiring users to import individual photos from their drives, the Picasa software automatically detects them as they are added — whether sent via e-mail or transferred from a digital camera. This part rocks.
And furthermore, just like in GMail, Picasa gets rid of the antiquated MS file names and folder conventions. This is really where the rubber hits the road: when you change the paradigm, you control the user expected experience. If Google's attempt to modify user behavior works, then MS and other desktop companies will be forced to change their approach to this kind of software.
And if they do so -- if they modify local search or folder conventions -- then Google has basically won. They're driving the innovation. Now that doesn't mean that Microsoft or Adobe couldn't still sneak up and steal the market, but they would have to knock off the market leader.
And we all saw how MS almost didn't do it with Netscape, and what it cost MS to do it. Furthermore, the scary part (to MS at least) is that Picasa only runs on Windows -- it's directly targeted at the MS platform.
The next Net battle has been underway for awhile; we're only realizing just now how far ahead some of the recent innovators (like Google) really are.
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