Philosophie de Google

If you care to drift back a few paces in your mind to your childhood you may recall some of the ways that you viewed the world and some of your habits. You may note both the differences of your child mind and your adult mind as well as some behaviors and beliefs that have grown up with you.


If you've been an internet user for a while you may remember the early days of Google, that period before they owned and provided nearly ever class of internet deliverable content and services. Way back yonder Google was only an exceptionally simple search engine. The homepage consisted of the Google logo, a search box, options to search Stanford University and Linux related sites. Also, there were links to Help!, About Google!, Company Info, and Google! logos. They even had an option to subscribe to a list for Google updates.


Google is a decent company in my eyes, at least from the position of a user. Unlike Microsoft, they don't make an effort to tell you what it is that you like or need. Google simplicity is also far from the robustness that is Yahoo!.

These days Google is beginning to become a conglomerate. They've added services such as Gmail for email, maps, and book search. Also, they have a few applications in their arsenal like Google Earth, a searchable three dimensional model of the earth, Picasa, a digital image manager and Sketchup, a 3D modeling package. Google has also recently acquired Blogger and YouTube. Google is growing up, quickly!

Somehow they manage to continue to build on the old without becoming a burden to the people who use the products they supply. Their aesthetic sense is such that they deliver service without making you hunt around their site to get your tasks accomplished.

One other thing I really like about them is that they have a graduated program for their services. Originally, any new service was introduced as beta. They have since added another layer to precede beta stages, this layer has been coined Google Labs.

I personally use Google's Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, Talk and Picasa web services. Actually, it is Picasa that inspired me to write this. I'll occasionally go on the site to glance at
photos I've taken or to show off some of my shots to friends. Today when I was on the site I noticed a new addition, there was a menu with icons that hadn't been there before. The menu's purpose is to allow you to select what type of search you'd like to do between your photos and your favorites. Actually the option itself had been there for a while but, the icons were new. That's the way Google grows, bit by bit. Without doing any great deal of research, I've noticed that most of the sites I use have their buggiest periods during sitewide revisions. I think Google's step ladder approach helps them to avoid conflicts wen they are updating their web presence.


I do suppose that one day Google could fall and become like some of the computing giants that are used because of a monopolizing presence and not because of personal favor. For now, I'm happy with Google.