Google OS MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - March 3, 2009 UTC - Amidst rampant media speculation, Google Inc. finally announced its own operating system, called GO''s. Some say this will be Google’s final attempt to invert last two year’s painful struggle to survive. Google is now a doomed company. It all started four years ago, on 2005. MSN Search was officially launched on February of that year; but and most important, almost at the same time, a now famous plug-in to Firefox, called Butler, was silently launched without almost no fuss. But it changed everything. Not a lot of people installed it from start, but it inspired other companies to offer similar tools on their browsers. On 2006, the creators of the Opera browser included a similar tool, not as a plug-in, but already on the product itself, as an option. Using it, the user was able to remove almost all commercial banners, buttons, skyscrapers and inlines from pages considered as UAI. Only some ad-links formats survived. Other soon followed, mostly after the creation the UAI nomenclature. UAI stand for “Universally Accessible Information” and the definition is “world''s information that should be universally and easily free accessible to anyone in a useful, clear and no intrusive or biased way”. The UAI Foundation, created on 2006, was a spin-off of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, but some say Microsoft toss some money in. The fun and ironic part is that the UAI creators say they were inspired by the Google’s mission sentence on top of Google corporate info web page. Besides being almost 10 year old, it’s still there. The UAI Foundation defends that the UAI contents belong to every one of us and those who order and categorized it provide a public service. More, they say that, in order to maintain this information impartial and fair, there should and will be a World organization responsible for providing tools to organize and it for free. Microsoft joined the UAI crowd on 2007, with the release of sp1 to Internet Explorer 7. The default settings of the browser installation went much further than the pop-up blocking of IE7 and fully supported UAI, thus blocking all commercial content from pages categorized as UAI. And worst of all, like the spyware lists, updates were available on regular basis on pages that ought to be considered as UAI. There was only one big page that was proud of being on top of the UAI list: the good old dmoz.org open directory project! After some discussion, all Google and MSN Search, almost all Yahoo pages, and many others, ended up categorized as UAI. No commercial content remained on those pages when using IE7. The results were shown as almost part of the browser itself on a fast loading clear reading uniform text. Not even ad-links survived. Needless to say, Microsoft and Google went to court. Microsoft made some points arguing Google was the first one to alter the content of any web page on its benefit with the introduction, on late 2005, of the AutoLink Google Toolbar Tags. 2005 was, indeed, a shifting year. After some long court debates, Microsoft changed the default to optional but it was already too late. Google was already seriously hurt right where it hurts the most and Google revenues dropped by more than 70%. Also, Wall Street already has been punishing the GOOG stock, dumping it since the first rumours of the UAI creation. Some say IE7 sp1 was a direct response from Microsoft to the GBrowser, launched one year before, on 2006. And more, that the Microsoft move was hard play but it was the only move Microsoft could have done in order to survive Google. And this time around, it’s Google time to, again, invade Microsoft backyard. Let’s see who finally wins. There can be only one. |