Getting Old and My Fascination with Google
Jul. 5, 2006 by ravishan
Getting Old
My heartfelt thanks to you all for the surprise party on June 29th to celebrate my 20 years at Wesleyan and my 50th birthday… After we left Wesleyan, the party continued with our good friends who had one surprise after another until we ended one of the most memorable days in my life with a fabulous dinner in the company of people that are very dear to me.
If I am 50, I guess I should feel old. Strangely I don’t. Depending on who you ask this may be good (or bad). What really hit me was getting a paper mail from AARP listing some 50 reasons why I should join AARP. A letter from AARP? Well that really made me think hard about my age…
I was wondering aloud as to how AARP got to know about my date of birth to be so prompt in sending me the invitation to join. One can theorize about the source of the information and find out exactly how they get this information by going to Google.
This sort of led me to Google. I am fascinated by Google for a variety of reasons. In this day and age, where there are so many choices for anything and everything, it is extremely hard to stand out and get the attention of millions (or billions) of people and most importantly keep them engaged. Google has not only done this successfully, but keeps going. Granted that all of what they do is somehow related to efficient searching, but look at where they are headed:
Google Products. And they are not done.
The most important development I think is Google’s attempt to get into a Microsoft Office like product where the application runs on your browser and the documents are saved on their server. Mike Roy and I have successfully collaborated on documents stored on Google’s server using writely (Google took over this company and is in the process of integrating the web word processing software from them into Google) for word like documents and Google spreadsheet. This is just brilliant – the documents are accessible from everywhere, can easily be collaborated on and has a lot of features you find in Word and Excel.
I also love Google Desktop and Google for mobile devices. Google desktop searches my outlook emails faster than any other tool I have. Google gadgets add cool things to my desktop…
There are a lof issues one should think about before delving into these technologies…
- We are always suspicious when our files are on someone else’s server.
- Is Google mining data when we use their tools to profile us?
- Even worse, would they sell this information to vendors who will then target us with email solicitations?
Whereas I am not worried about these issues myself (because my tolerance for these is pretty high), you may not find these to be trivial issues. However, these are exciting opportunities that we need to be familiar with and ask the questions about privacy and get answers so we can present these to our faculty, students and staff in a balanced way.
It is quite obvious that Google is going after Microsoft. It is also apparent that Microsoft is always catching up and lacking any innovation. It may not be too far before our basic computing needs are being supported by Google with applications running on the web on demand and data being stored on some server somewhere, accessible from wherever there is web access. This is a very attractive model and is likely to work for many of the applications we use. For example we don’t have to worry about upgrading or maintaining the software or backing up the data.
Despite the fact that users adapting such new and drastically different technologies take a long time, we should start thinking about how our own support model will look in an environment like this….