suckmysav wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:26:53 +0000, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
Google should make a Linux
,----[ Quote ]
| Could a Googleux be successful? It would have to allow users to do
| useful work without a network connection. It would have to be
| able to read and write existing Microsoft file types, with PDF
| thrown in for bonus points. It would have to be open enough to
| allow companies to port their applications and hardware to it.
| Finally, it would have to be something that PC manufacturers
| would support with more than lip service - a distribution on
| a hard drive, with the user able to select/switch from it
| or Windows Vista.
`----
The question to ask is "How would Google benefit from doing this?"
It seems to me that Google has a very Sun-like view of how things should
work, that is "The network is the computer". Even Microsoft can't discount
the possibility that this idea won't evolve into reality, hence "Office
Live"
In short, Google (and Sun) want to marginalise Microsoft by making the
whole monolithic-operating-system-that-runs-applications-locally
paradigm obsolete.
So, how would "Goonix" help in this scenario? About the only way I could
see it help is if they produced a stripped down Linux that was basically
just an interface to Googles server infrastructure. Perhaps it could
be distributed in conjunction with yet another iteration of the often
tried, always failed "net appliance" hardware idea.
They could do that and offer a higher level of integration than is possible
via just a browser I suppose but I'm not sure if doing that would be
beneficial at all, and it may in fact be detrimental to the whole
"applications are OS agnostic" idea in the first place.
This is why I don't feel you will see Goonix being released, not unless it
is purely done as a way to stick it up Ballmer and Co and ensure that
Windows marketshare continues to be eroded.
Google's profit stream is also based on a no-privacy model. Ads are
targeted to searches, gmail contents are indexed, etc. A Google *nix
distro might be a privacy advocate's nightmare come true.
If you don't mind all your data sitting one someone else's server, being
inaccessible if your network (or their servers) is down, indexed for
advertisements (and who knows what else), then perhaps it might fly.
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