Few months ago with the launch of the beta version of the Googlewave, the company made sure heads were turned yet again. As Google declares, the Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.
Google: The innovator par excellence delivers as always.
A wave is a documented conversation where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Collaborative projects will become so much easier even if people are geographically separated. People can communicate and work together with formatted text, photos, videos and maps. The documented discussion can be edited, and thus knowledge creation can be so much easier without buildup of unusable information on the discussion. These are the features on offer on the Beta version itself. Techies globally are dying in anticipation of what’s coming next.
Similarly, Google is revamping its product mix on offer amongst its Office applications also. One such offering on the line is Google Voice. Google Voice is a service with which one can access the voice-mail online, read automatic transcriptions of voice-mails, create personalized greetings based on who is calling, make cheap international calls, and promises to deliver so much more.
Targeting the SMEs, Google launched its Google Applications, better known as GoogleAps. The service provides Google calenders where SMEs manage meetings, TBDs and so much more. Similarly Google Docs provide a way to collaborate and develop business documents online. A small offering that Google recently provided through Google Docs is the added capacity to upload non-standard files of upto 250MB also. There are group facilities to share files and collaborate through mails. Similarly Google Sites is an easy way to create secure web pages for intranets and team projects where no coding or HTML is required to develop the same. And last, but the core offering, is the Gmail.
Targeting the mobile market, Google launched the Android creating a huge hype in the mobile market segment. Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. It was initially developed by Android Inc., a firm later purchased by Google and lately by the Open Handset Alliance (a consortium of several companies which include Texas Instruments, Broadcom Corporation, Google, HTC, Intel, LG, Marvell Technology Group, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile ).
The way Google is revamping the way humans interact with technology, maybe it won’t be far when Google takes over the PC operating systems completely. With the scheduled launch of Chrome OS in mid-2010, Google enthusiasts are awaiting in anticipation of what lies ahead. Google Chrome OS has been declared to be an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at net-books and will look into 3 main factor(S or Aces?): speed, simplicity and security.
Time for the other big software firms to rethink their offerings and strategy. Will anyone be able to pose a serious challenge?