Tuesday, May 18, 2010

What's Google Up To?

In a previous post, we saw the Microsoft is aimed at the corporate world with a vision straight out of 2006. After briefly researching that, I spent some time scoping out keynote speeches by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and decided that this one was the best of the lot. It's over an hour long, but the first 3-10 minutes tell you the theme. The opening music video is really worth watching.


Google is all about freedom and mobility. Free software, open source code, free operating systems and open platforms for developers. At another site, I saw that while Google gives the Android OS away for free, Microsoft charges $25 per unit for Windows Mobile.

Android is the second best selling mobile OS on the market right now, behind Blackberry's and ahead of the iPhone.

Deep in his talk was something else I didn't know that was particularly exciting. Whereas Microsoft's Steve Ballmer talked about how the cloud "would be" important in the future, Google is doing it now. When I speak into my Droid to do a Google search, my voice is captured and shipped up to Google's cloud computers where the world's best voice-to-text algorithms running on monstrous machines decode what I said and that phrase is shipped back down to my Droid along with the search results. It all happens almost instantly. It's not that my Droid has or even needs the processing power to do speech-to-text, it's that it is connected to Google's cloud infrastructure where fantasmagorical power resides.

Now that's pretty cool.

3 comments:

Jeff Burton said...

I love google.

That is all.

K T Cat said...

Jeff, what's interesting about digging into these keynotes is how each company is so very different. I must say, I like Google's approach the best so far.

B-Daddy said...

Nice summary of issues KT. While not a fan of Google, I have to admire their approach.