“Living In The Google World” – The real answer for Microsoft

An article by Garett Rogers in his “Googling Google” blog on ZDNet inspired a response that I thought fit right into this “Living In The Google World Series”.

In his blog, Garett gives the suggest to Microsoft to partner with Google on their search results while secretly building their own new search engine.

That doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t address the real issue…Microsoft’s mindset.

Having lived most of their corporate lives with the growth of desktop computing, that’s the world they live in. Add to it that the company makes most of it’s revenues from OS’s and desktop apps and you can see how easily they can be stuck in the older “desktop world”.

I see one simple answer on how they can fix this:

Microsoft needs to form a division that lives, breathes, eats and sleeps only on the web.

This group needs to eschew any sort of desktop app, use only web apps and mobile devices. 

Doing so will clearly put them into the experience of what today’s advanced users and tomorrows regular users need and want. I think it will also put them into the experience that their competition (Google) is living every day.

It’s going to be annoying to them for a while, but they can start by using Chrome and the Google App suite in order to learn it inside and out. This will help knock them even further out of their “Microsoft dominate the world with desktop software 1990’s” mindset. 

The knowledge and experience Microsoft gains from this division will make it easy for then to know what to build. From there, they can put their muscle and $ behind building it.

As I mentioned, the nature of their company right now is that their revenues come from the OS and from their apps.

That’s the revenue that makes their company work, so they are compelled to “adapt” that software to work with the new paradigm with mediocre results. 

Better to start with a new “class” of thinking and get back into the game before their boat anchor OS’s and desktop apps pull them down any further.

There’s the answer. Easy to say, harder to do. Still, I bet Microsoft could easily do it if they just get out of their own way.

You can read all of Garett’s story here.

“Living In The Google World” – Morning 1 – Working with Images

Day 1 Morning:

This is the first day of “Living In The Google World” and I decided my first adventure would be to figure out how to edit and add images to “The Chrome Voice”.

So here goes:

Step 1 – Reinstall Chrome:

I want to start from a clean slate so I uninstall Chrome, reinstall, switch to the developer channel and update to version 0.2.152.1. 

All went well, and now I’m 100% Chrome and “Living In The Google World”.  

I do wonder why the about box for this version shows “Checking for new version”  constantly.
 

Step 2  - Find Photo editing tool

I start looking at Picasa online, but want more control over image editing so I go to Photoshop.com (Adobe’s online image editing).

The interface is fairly intuitive and the app runs lightning quick in Chrome.

One problem…I need to get an image to edit…and I’m not ready to run back to using my hard drive yet so I open up my online Picasa library directly from Photoshop.com. Very cool. 

(NOTE: 1st “Living in the Google World” Insight – I need my online apps to be able to fully access files to my online storage location in a secure fashion. This seems like a basic function that every online app should have.)

I pick a test file, make a quick edit and send it back to my Picasa online folder. So good so far. 
 

Step 3 – Make the photo accessible to this blog

Now I have to get this file to display on my blog. Easy. Picasa gives me a URL I can use to share. 

Well not quite…

For some reason, Word Press doesn’t like the URL when I try to use it to access the image.

I’m looking all over for the easy and obvious way to share, even hit the help file and see about emailing the link to myself. That still doesn’t work.

After about 10 minutes of trying, I give up and embed the image using HTML (see the image above).

So the net results of “Living in the Google World” so far? It’s taken me 60 minutes instead of 10 to create this post.

Ok, some of it was a learning curve and installation of software which was expected.

The part I didn’t expect and I would guess most typical users don’t have the patience for was messing around trying to figure out how to display a photo on my Picasa web album here.

Either there’s something I’m not getting about Picasa’s way of doing things or I just hit a friction spot that needs to be ironed out.

Summary:
Key learning: online file editing tools need to easily access online file hosting services
App for photo editing – www.photoshop.com
App for photo hosting – picasaweb.google.com
Browser: Google Chrome
Desktop Apps used: NONE
Desktop Storage used: NONE

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