Google’s Desktop v1.0

As I get older, I tend to forget where I put my stuff more and more. I used to think of myself as a fairly organized person; that is until I lose track of something and am frantically searching around the house, or my hard drive. I really try hard to be organized, really I do.

Having said this, the notion of a new piece of software from Google called Desktop is right on target. It indexes and searches your hard disk with the same speed and agility that Google does for the greater Internet. It works with Microsoft Office documents and emails from Outlook and Outlook Express, and AOL Instant Messenger conversations.

Google Desktop isn’t perfect. It opens up privacy concerns, especially if you are using a shared desktop and don’t have physical control over who accesses the computer. This is because it stores previously viewed Web pages, including Webmail pages. It also stores previously copies of your documents and deleted email messages. It doesn’t index anything other than text files and the Microsoft and AOL IM items mentioned earlier, and only runs on Windows XP and 2000 machines.

Still, this is a pretty active product space right now, and there are a number of competitors who are aiming carefully here. One includes Microsoft, who recently purchased Eric Hahn’s Lookout (from Lookoutsoft.com) tool for examining Outlook documents. Google Desktop doesn’t look inside attachments, and doesn’t index anything other than email messages – if you make use of Outlook’s notes, journal and to-do entries, contacts and other organizing items, then you are better off with Lookout than Google.

Others include X1.com and Copernic.com search tools, both of which index a large list of file types and can also examine the content of email attachments.

What none of these products have is integration of desktop and Internet search in the simple and usable Google display, and that is the not-so-secret sauce here. When you search for something, you can see results from both your own files as well as what is out on the Internet at large. That has the possibility of changing how we look for content, and it also means it is harder to lose track of that critical file. Even for this middle-aged semi-organized kind of guy.

You can read the entire article here on Network Computing’s Web site.

Google as the 900-pound gorilla

We are in the midst of some big changes, and the biggest competitor today is Google.

We are in a new world, where the lines between print and Web are not so clear. It isn’t a matter of Web pubs competing with print pubs, but the entire Internet is arranged differently and people are getting their information – especially technical information – in some very different ways. Gone are those general news portal sites. Does anyone still bookmark CNN.com and TheStreet.com? Indeed, what is a bookmarked site anymore? I can’t remember the last time I bookmarked a site. So yesterday.

The World of Google has become the 900-pound gorilla for supplying the best technical information. When we survey our engineering audience, they start by googling for some product information. While we would like them to first go to our own Web sites, the reality of the situation is that Google is their default home page.

Microsoft has it wrong: they are trying to extend Windows outward, across the Internet. That is yesterday’s thinking. While the desktop is important, Google has it completely right: take the search metaphor, and extend it downwards so that all of your information has just been merged with the zillions of Internet-based sources.

You can read the entire essay here.

On Google’s IPO

When Google went public, there was a lot of commentary. Here is how I weighed in.

I think the financial industry has turned a new chapter. I might even go so far as to hope that a new breed of honest analysts and bankers is upon us. Gone (hopefully for good) are the dark days of the post-go-go years. There are three ways that the Google IPO is significant.

First, we have validation that the days are over in which investment bankers view themselves as above the law, and can dictate terms to their nascent public companies.

Second, given the already superheated hype of this offering, the company has decided to capture more of the revenue from its initial offering by holding an auction for the right to own shares.

The third interesting angle of the Google IPO is how the company has created two classes of shares: one for its executives, and one for the rest of us. The commoners’ shares are diluted, meaning that the insiders retain a tremendous control on the company, even for a public company.

You can read the entire essay here.

So what if you are a monopolist?

IE has become the defacto operating system environment for the Internet, like it or not. Just about every vendor that has come through lately to show me their latest and greatest software has something that works only on IE, only on Windows, and only on version 5.x or later. Why bother writing code for anything else? It is, after all, what most of us use on our desktops.

Well now, today’s news is that Microsoft is considered a European monopolist. Ironic, isn’t it, after all these years of investigation for locking up the browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows desktop, the Europeans nail Microsoft for being piggish with the Media Player? Doubly ironic, when you consider another operating system vendor that bundles its browser and media player software on its desktops, and nobody is going after it. Of course, I refer to Apple, with its Safari and iTunes applications. I guess having a two or three percent market share is the best way to keep the government lawyers from tying you up in legal knots.

The trouble with Apple is that the company still thinks it can go this alone and forget that there is a hungry world of partners and developers out there, anxious to license and embrace and extend the company’s work. As Chris Stone, the CTO of Novell told me not too long ago: “If Apple just could put Aqua in open source, Microsoft would be in deep trouble, and the game would be over. People would rush to develop apps using that software.”

Indeed.

Instead, we say, “So what?” Say the Europeans fine Microsoft a bazillion dollars. Microsoft cuts the check. Its corporate treasury makes back the dough in about 3.5 days’ worth of sales. Life goes on. Meanwhile, more and more ISVs write to Windows Media Player and IE. Eventually, the alternatives die on the vine, like an overexposed Netscape that has been through too many corporate acquisitions. Do you remember Netscape?

The problem is that the world court of opinion doesn’t evolve fast enough to keep up with technology. In the meantime, we are stuck with IE. And soon we will be stuck with Windows Media Player too, Europe notwithstanding.

You can read the entire essay here.

EMC, Microsoft’s latest enemy

Joe Tucci has been going around saying that EMC is going to become a software company, and with the acquisitions for Legato and Documentum, the CEO meant what he said. Now, with the acquisition of VMware, the storage vendor has a chance to really deliver on this software vision, and, in the process, it could give Microsoft some serious competition. Furthermore, the new acquisition puts the other two in perspective and could be the biggest news — and market opportunity — yet for EMC.

You can read the entire essay here.

Windows NT, Microsoft’s secret enemy

Microsoft’s latest Windows software this year isn’t all about the desktop, it is a new version of Windows Server 2003 that will be the first in several years. While it is conventional wisdom that Linux is its biggest competitor, my thought for today is that Linux will have to take a second seat to the real challenge: getting people to convert from NT. Surprise: Microsoft’s secret enemy is inertia, or itself.

At our XChange conference last week, a representative from Redmond stated that there are at least 4 million NT servers out in the wild that are ripe for the upgrading. (And that isn’t counting all the ones on Microsoft’s own network either. Or maybe it is.) Our own surveys done for the upcoming State of Enterprise Spending issue at VARBusiness show that enterprises are still moderately investing in NT, holding about the same market share as Linux at 37 percent. No matter whose numbers you trust, that’s a lot of NT lying around that no one is too thrilled about having to touch going forward.

You can read the entire essay here.

Google dating

My working example for the past several years of a New Yorker
Internet-related cartoon has been “On the Internet no one
knows you are dog” — spoken by one canine as he is typing on
his PC, no doubt using some form of doggie IM. Well, I am
going to have to update my mental cartoon archive — a more
recent panel featured two guys in a bar, one saying to the
other “I can’t explain it — it’s just a funny feeling that
I’m being Googled.”

Well now, my world has changed. We live in scarier times.
Mistrust is everywhere. What better way to check out a
potential girl/boyfriend than to Google them, as first
reported in the New York Observer about two years ago?
Some people call this Google dating.

You can read the entire essay here.

Why convergence won’t happen

The Consumer Electronics Show was held last week in Vegas, and the big news from the show is more talk about convergence of home electronics and computing. I got this incredible sense of déjà vu and it made me dust off a column that I wrote for Inforworld nearly ten years ago on the topic. The column begins:

“I am sick and tired about hearing about the coming convergence of consumer electronics, computers, and communications. And most of the articles that I’ve read about this mega-trend are focused in the wrong area.

You can read the entire essay here.

Microsoft vs. Time Warner

Microsoft has made some minor noises about eliminating the browser icon from subsequent versions of Windows. But this isn’t really much more than an empty gesture: at this juncture, browsing technology is firmly embedded so deeply into Windows that you couldn’t remove it without crashing your system. And anyway, who would want to? We all use Internet Explorer anyway, and have learned to live with its quirks (Active X) and oddities (a space in a URL brings up an error, a space in the same window when I am browsing my hard disk is acceptable). Who cares about Netscape’s browser? It is so Novell, so 1994. You might as well bring back DOS.

But Netscape has been transformed into what is now called AOL Time Warner, and it is a formidable competitor to Microsoft.

You can read the entire essay here.