Jeremiah's Music Blog: Google Calendar and the Demise of MS Office

Google Calendar and the Demise of MS Office

Via Digg today are screenshots of Google's calendar product, which will be integrated with GMail this summer.

I have said before (and now I'll do it here) the real threat to Microsoft's dominance is Google. As an example, GMail will now host your domain as well. In one fell swoop this eliminates a huge market for not only Microsoft's Exchange Server and its client counterpart Outlook, but the expensive grey boxes that run that software, and the expensive khaki-army companies that support them.

The near-future of computing (at least in relation to information management, i.e., email and word processing, databases, spreadsheet and analysis software, web browsing, media consumption) seems to be leaning toward smaller, niche devices who's value lies in thier ability to connect to networks of data. In short: fat-server, thin-clients.

This could be interpreted as a return to the centralized computing model. In some ways I agree, however, the differentiating factor being the distributed nature of the network and much of the data that's being accessed.

Sometime this year, Google will announce the Google OS, and with it a number of devices built around the concept I descibed above. An LCD/stylus tablet with WiFi and GPS will connect to Google services, allowing access to such handy services as Google Maps, Google Video (all the TV you want, on demand without the TiVo), and of course, Craigslist Casual Encounters.

But I'm probably wrong.

Posted by Jeremiah at March 8, 2006 08:52 AM | Tag This Post | Digg It!