Friday, May 06, 2005

Google's strategy: make the web the desktop

Google has just announced its Web Accelerator
Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.
Google now offers an email service, a mapping service (including satellite views), and many others — besides search. It is amazing to me that it can afford to offer more than 2 GB of storage for emails. I'm surprised they haven't yet offered free general file storage. It seems like they are attempting to move people away from their own desktops and to the Google system as their home. The Web is certainly a good place to call home. Most people live there anyway. The challenge Google faces is to make the web interface one that people can live with. There have been rumors that Google will develop its own browser. The biggest challenge is the awkwardness of html and related web technology. It just isn't up to real computing. Will Google attempt to define a new applet-like or flash-like plugin that will support more sophisticated computing?

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Mozilla browsers already implement a rich user-interface technology based on XML, CSS, and JavaScript. The interface of Mozilla browsers are themselves built on this framework, but it's flexible enough to be used in place of traditional HTML in any web application (assuming all the clients use Gecko-based browsers). It's called XUL.