The Quickening

So Google killed off Reader with only three and a half months’ lead time, to the outrage of the entire Internet.  And a week later, they dropped the all-new Google Keep, an addendum to Google Drive meant as an all-purpose note-bucket…which everyone immediately saw as aimed squarely at Evernote, the best-of-breed all-everything data repository (one I make a LOT of use of, including notes toward these very blog entries).

Add to that the rumblings that there’s now a Google Watch in the offing – not surprising, but given the focus on Google Glass, it seemed as if the Beast of Mountain View was going to put most of its “wearable computing” eggs in the “eyewear” basket–

Hold up.

That phrase.  The Beast of Mountain View.  Shouldn’t that be the Beast of Redmond?  Nope.  In fact, one Mac partisan has gone so far as to declare that Microsoft is no longer the enemy.  Sure, Windows is still out there and PCs running Win7 and its predecessors are a dominant ecosystem, but in the post-PC world? Microsoft is an afterthought.  Its digital music offerings ranged from worthless to risible.  Its phone offerings were too little too late, and while intriguing currently has little prospect of rating better than a poor third in the smartphone world.  It’s not aiming to dethrone Android or iOS, it’s aiming to lap Blackberry.  The XBox – itself starting to get a bit long in the tooth – is the only spot off the desktop where Microsoft has made a dent.  And their attempt to repurpose and rebrand Hotmail as Outlook.com, complete with Google-bashing commercials, was roundly mocked and ultimately dismissed.

Meanwhile, Google’s push into new areas continues.  G+ remains a point of emphasis to compete with Facebook.  Google Play continues to be pushed as the alternative to the iTunes Music Store or Amazon (especially given the irony that Amazon built its own tablet ecosystem on Android). Google Apps for Business have reached a point that one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley is running its entire ecosystem on them – eschewing Office, Exchange and Outlook altogether.  The Nexus line now includes a 4″ phone, a 7″ tablet and a 10″ tablet to cover the entire range of touch devices, and there’s a nice slim metal ultrabook-style Google Chromebook. And now there’s apparently going to be a mythical Google watch, to go with the mythical iWatch and mythical Samsung watch.

Google has become the new Microsoft again – they were truly indispensable for years in the field of search, especially map search, and Gmail overwhelmed Yahoo and Hotmail and all its other competitors, and one thing led to another and now way too many of us couldn’t get by without at least one Google service.  And tragically, somebody just beat me to this post while it sat in my drafts folder, so here is his take – and he’s spot on.

The fact that people are talking about how to live without Google should be the most disconcerting thing of all for the powers that be out on 1600 Amphitheater Parkway.  For my own part, now that Reader won’t be a thing anymore, it’s possible for the first time to contemplate life completely free of the big G.  Hell, Apple Maps got me to my physical therapist this morning bang on time and without a hiccup.  2013 may turn out to be the year that Google got added to the old EUS creed: “We don’t drink flavored liquor, we don’t smoke machine-rolled cigars, and we don’t put mission-critical work on Microsoft products.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.