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Google Glass now OPEN-Source

Posted on by Saru

Now I am very convinced that this a pet project that Google doesn’t care about in terms of making money out of it. Google makes two types of products, one for themselves to make money out of and the other just to disrupt or balance out the market and make end users their product for their advertisements. Google directly makes money out of Google apps, Google search, Youtube, etc. Their other products(Open Source) such as Android, Chromium, WebM etc are just out there with a reason claiming a reason of giving back to the community, but in reality Open source is the key word they use to conceal their inabilities to create a success story out of the product and there by asking the world to make it better and a success. Can’t Google make their own hardware with a partnership and sell just Google phones? No, clearly that won’t succeed against apple at the same rate as android has grown over the past couple of years with the support of Samsung,LG,HTC,Motorola,Sony etc. Same is the case with Chrome/ WebM. It will be the case with Google Glass as well. Google Chrome, Android are out there to show and market Google’s products and Ads to End users like us. Its a yet another platform for making us the product. Now with Google Glass “Open Sourced” the entire geek community is now going to tweak Google Glass and make it even better in turn making the adoption a little more evident, without which it would just disappear like the Google phone(oops had forgotten it was called Nexus) in oblivion.

When the Google glasses hits the market I predict it will just be mediocre and have similar sales figures like the Google Nexus. It just won’t be a revolutionary product like the iPad.

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Whats-up-at-Google

Posted on by Saru

Whats up at Google

Very interesting insight into how things have changed in Google and what made James Whittaker move back to Microsoft. The entire post of his summarizes how things are at Google and whats up at Google these days and how it has changed from old times.

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s? No company has ever done that for Google and Google took it personally.

Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

Interesting how times change and how being on the helm of innovation is so damn important for companies like Microsoft,Google and Apple. Doing the right things at the right time can’t be discounted either. Google still has an edge, but i guess too many cooks are spoiling their broth.

He sums it up quite nicely here.

Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. You have to admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent behind a threat to its business. Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Google+ and me, we were simply never meant to be. Truth is I’ve never been much on advertising. I don’t click on ads. When Gmail displays ads based on things I type into my email message it creeps me out.

Clearly show whats exactly happening at Google HQ and why things aren’t working well with Google, and whats making important people quit Google.