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6th February 2006

Google aims at the desktop

posted in open source |

Desktop operating system software (”Windows”) and productivity software (”Office”) are the bread and butter for Microsoft. OpenOffice continues to offer a powerful, free alternative when it comes to productivity software. Now it appears that Google is taking aim at the desktop operating system environment with an upcoming distribution of Linux.

Ubuntu Linux is continuing to grow in popularity, and although I don’t have extensive experience with it, Ubuntu is my favorite flavor of Linux based on distros I’ve tried to date. It will be very interesting to see Google join this mix. I predict that as the $100 laptop initiative moves forward and more people become familiar with the power, ease of use, and other benefits of Linux (especially cost compared to power), more users will migrate to the open source operating system environment. It appears Google developers may share this view. :-)
Thanks to Steve Burt for this link.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 11:24 am and is filed under open source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 2 responses to “Google aims at the desktop”

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  1. 1 On February 7th, 2006, Solveig Haugland said:

    You’ve got to admire Google–they’re not sitting around surfing the net. They’re also in tentative talks with Dell to distribute Google software on Dell computers. CNBC or MSNBC, not sure which, was the source. So with the ability to install possibly an operating system, possible an *office suite* which is presumably OpenOffice.org, and gmail….this might well be the thing we all look back on as the beginning of Microsoft’s decline.

    If Google can turn gmail into something that could replace Outlook, I think we could comfortably bet on google to dominate the desktop very soon.

  2. 2 On February 7th, 2006, Wesley Fryer said:

    I agree that would really be something, but with the long lasting relationship Dell has had with Microsoft I would be very surprised if the availability of Dell PCs with anything other than MS Windows would be widely heralded (by Dell). I understand Dell now ships computers with Linux pre-installed, but this isn’t featured prominently in the Dell store.

    Still, who knows? I have been wondering what could push the average consumer’s awareness and acceptance of Linux to a “tipping point.” If Dell embraces a Google OS, that could possibly do it…..