Still Doing The Right Thing (TM)?
I was playing with the Google page creator earlier today seeing how flexible it was, the answer is not very, but then that was to be expected, at least to begin with. I put in a couple of links, a picture and left it at that when I realised it wouldn't take my Del.icio.us link rolls.
But as I sat back and thought about it I realised just how much I have come to use Google's tools as part of my daily life. Any form I use on the web is spell checked with the Google toolbar, here I am writing on a Google owned blog and only this morning I was persuading our centre administrator to make an additional .ics file available with all the seminars on so that I didn't have to add them manually myself to the new Google Calendar I'm trialing. I check my Gmail regularly as it's my only personal email address I still use and I haven't touched another search engine in years. I even tried Google desktop until my poor work computer decided it couldn't cope with something as advanced as that ;o)
So are they still doing the right thing? As I said the page creator is a bit naff for anyone who has the slightest knowledge of HTML, but it's straightforward and easy to use, almost anyone could knock together a page in no-time at all. It's the Calendar that's really got my goat though, there's no synchronisation ability, not with any portable device or any standard program. There's the ability to import .ics files from the web, the ability to import and export your calendar files to outlook etc, but no actual live sync facility. Without which, to most of the technical world, the calendar is useless. They are both still in the labs/beta so I suppose there is some leeway for little errors, but you would have thought that they might have investigated the market a little before releasing them even as beta.
So in answer to this title, I think they are still doing the right thing generally, but it's slipping, the new projects arriving at our desktops are not quite as paradigm shifting as they once were, and some of them feel a little under baked. Pull your socks up Google, it's not about being first on the market, you proved that with the search engine, it's about being the best and doing things that make people say "Now why didn't I think of that?"
But as I sat back and thought about it I realised just how much I have come to use Google's tools as part of my daily life. Any form I use on the web is spell checked with the Google toolbar, here I am writing on a Google owned blog and only this morning I was persuading our centre administrator to make an additional .ics file available with all the seminars on so that I didn't have to add them manually myself to the new Google Calendar I'm trialing. I check my Gmail regularly as it's my only personal email address I still use and I haven't touched another search engine in years. I even tried Google desktop until my poor work computer decided it couldn't cope with something as advanced as that ;o)
So are they still doing the right thing? As I said the page creator is a bit naff for anyone who has the slightest knowledge of HTML, but it's straightforward and easy to use, almost anyone could knock together a page in no-time at all. It's the Calendar that's really got my goat though, there's no synchronisation ability, not with any portable device or any standard program. There's the ability to import .ics files from the web, the ability to import and export your calendar files to outlook etc, but no actual live sync facility. Without which, to most of the technical world, the calendar is useless. They are both still in the labs/beta so I suppose there is some leeway for little errors, but you would have thought that they might have investigated the market a little before releasing them even as beta.
So in answer to this title, I think they are still doing the right thing generally, but it's slipping, the new projects arriving at our desktops are not quite as paradigm shifting as they once were, and some of them feel a little under baked. Pull your socks up Google, it's not about being first on the market, you proved that with the search engine, it's about being the best and doing things that make people say "Now why didn't I think of that?"
posted by Egmel at 3:04 pm
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