Google's Strategy

As google takes its second step into the field of hosting with googlepages, gradually its stategy is becoming clearer and clearer. Google's mission to categorise/organise information seems to have taken wide and even no meaning in some cases after the very successful advertising program. For example, offering users to create webpages for themselves does not strictly fall into the category of organising information. However, one can fit almost anything on the name of organising information. For example, writing a book in English Grammar can fall into the category of organising information but there are millions of books available on the same subject and the information related to the subject is already organised.

Another example that does not seemingly relate to organising information is Google Talk. It is one of the hundreds of VOIP applications allowing people to talk. A third example can be Gbuy - an online payment system - which is in pipeline.

As a company grows, its mission can become wider as it appears to be the case with google. The strategy of google seems to focus of innovation. Innovation providing superior user experience makes the user promote the application because he/she just loves it. This gives rise to more usage, which in turn gives rise to more advertising revenues for google. More and more products of google are coming into the lifestyle of user and the strategy appears to completely dominate internet and eventually dominate desktop as well. There is nothing wrong with it as long as it is win-win situation. Perhaps all google needs to do is to edit their motto related to categorisation/classification of information.

Why Google?

Microsoft agreed to block the blog of a Chinese writer!

Yahoo agreed to provide the IP address of a person to Chinese authorities who was using Yahoo mail to send some information related to China.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to follow the Chinese local laws for wanting to do business there.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to provide details regarding search data asked by US govt.

But when Google introduced filtered search results for one of their sites to abide by the local laws in China, there is huge cry about it. It is interesting to note that the results are filtered only at google.cn site. If a user does not want filtered results, google.com and scores of sites like google.co.uk etc. can be used. In this context there seems to be too much noise regarding this issue.

I guess, google is paying the price of being famous. One thinks of Google when one thinks about internet. It has also become synonymous for innovation and success. It is not just Google's philosophy, "Don't be evil" that is being ridiculed and is responsible for so much of negative publicity since all corporations claim to back great philosophies and appear evil at times.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta

Finally, IE 7 beta can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/ie7betaredirect.mspx if you have a genuine windows XP (SP2) system.

The download and installation were smooth but required restart. The first look after running it reminded me of Opera. It has a new look and offers new features. However, these features may not be new to someone using Firefox or Opera. There is tabbed browsing, meaning no need to open various windows to open different URLs (Incidentally, when it crashed all the tabs were closed.). It has built in search window at the top that even allows you to use google. There is an RSS feed reader and overall a nice aesthetic look. The button to open new tab is not so obvious at the first look. There were also a few bugs that I noticed, like cursor not showing at appropriate place and text not showing even though it is typed in black in white background and occasional crashes. IE 7 beta had difficulty in running a Java based live classes application that ran without any problem in Firefox. I hope Microsoft takes care of these issues when IE 7 goes out of beta.

Note: The screenshot contains the 123iitjee.com toolbar.