Called It
Three years before Google Chrome, four years before the Chrome OS announcement, one year before the Writely acquisition, one year before the launch of Google Labs Spreadsheet, and two years before the ‘netbook revolution’.
Google has a strong API on top of the browser, and is building a large enough collection of Apps running on that API that they can realistically do ‘typical office work’: Web Surfing, Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Email, IM, and Solitaire.
They get the Web Surfing for free since you need a browser for the other apps, they have IM and Email, and PopCap and friends take care of the simple games. There are a couple Ajax-based spreadsheets out there, and it’s not too difficult to imagine a Word Processor based around Mozilla’s designMode or IE’s contentEditable. Especially since Google is already parsing Word and PDF files (and converting them to HTML) for their search engine.
So far, no platform, but the idea I keep hearing is that with that suite available Google will move down the stack, releasing a ‘Google Browser’ (say, a rebadged Firefox) and then a full-on ‘Google OS’. That is, something along the lines of a Knoppix CD-based system that boots and puts you straight into the browser. The logic behind the OS idea is usually something like “They run Linux on all their servers, and they have a lot of smart people, so building a custom distro would be easy.” It’s complete speculation on the part of everyone, but it has enough internal consistency that it makes a decent ‘what if’ topic. (Personally I prefer “What if Apple had put more resources into A/UX rather than Copland?”, but I’m not quite mainstream…)
Actually, now that I’ve written that all down in one place, it’s basically Larry Ellison’s Network Computer idea, but running on commodity hardware and without the Oracle badge.
(And yes, I do recognize that while you’d be able to access you information from any machine with net access and have complete searching through everything, you would be trusting Google to store your data, only mine it when you ask them to, and you’d never be able to go offline.)
If you follow the thread a little further, however, I go off into the weeds and say that this doesn’t make sense for home users. Which is completely ridiculous. Not having to install fifteen applications and transfer a bunch data every time a harddrive fails or a computer is replaced or added is a tremendous benefit to the home/SOHO market.
