Yesterday I got a quick look at where Google is going with its mobile programs. I had lunch with an anonymous iPhone owner who already had the next generation of Google Apps installed on his iPhone. As he punched the bottom button, all the apps opened one after the other,without being individually called up from the web. All the information was there. In other words, once you opened one of your Google Apps (and I saw Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Doc, and Notebook), they were all immediately available. Right now, I have Google Reader and Calendar separately bookmarked, and Gmail (IMAP) as my primary email. Quite a bit of waiting involved, at least over EDGE.
I asked when this improvement would launch, and was told "when it’s ready." And I said, "it looks ready." My companion said "almost."
My impression was that when this next generation of mobile apps was released, not only would the accesibility be better, but the interface would be even simpler than it is now. It looked as thought I would be very close to having the productivity power than used to be on the desktop on my iPhone.
So then how does Google monetize this? Will I be looking at ads on my iPhone bookmarks? Or will Android somehow solve this?
At times like these I wish I had a little more technical expertise so I could make a better prediction about what the final mosaic is going to look like. When I heard Google VP Doug Merrill speak a couple of weeks ago, he said Google’s objective is to make all the world’s information available and accessible. Available is probably the search piece of the objective, and accessible probably falls under the mobile piece.
But the funny part is, I don’t think Google itself knows what the mosaic will look like, because they open source everything they develop, and they can have no idea what other people will do with it. Example: Google Maps.
Very fascinating. And the answer I got to "what does Open Social really mean?" "Anything the users want it to mean."
What a fun company. Does it operate according to chaos theory, with its own internal pattern that we customers don’t have to understand?
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Google apps with ads or without – I vote without; would I pay a penny/nickle for each document I open? Might. I like the Google chaos monetization theory BTW, but not sure they are targeting this app for revenue.