9/24/2004
Jobs @Yahoo
Yahoo has some interesting job openings for engineers and scientists, and they wrote about that in their blog. So anyone interested in a job in the search industry might consider checking these out.
Yahoo has some interesting job openings for engineers and scientists, and they wrote about that in their blog. So anyone interested in a job in the search industry might consider checking these out.
Recently there has been a lot of speculation of what is commonly called a ‘Google OS’, a term I think has been coined by Jason Kottke. The idea behind this is, that Google is trying to advance into Microsoft’s territory by providing applications through the web browser, which formerly ran locally on the users machine. Gmail, which popped out of nowhere in April 2004, might have marked the beginning of this trend. In fact, due to it’s mighty javascript frontend, Gmail feels much more like an actual e-mail client than any web mail service before.
Then there have been rumours regarding a messenger service Google might be developing. It might be Jabber based and could use orkut data for contact lists. Other people think it might be built from Hello, a picture sharing application which belongs to Picasa, which was acquired by Google recently.
Finally there are even more speculations surrounding a Google browser, which might be built upon the open source Mozilla. Even the mainstream media has caught up on this, as the NY Post recently wrote about the possibility of this browser. And the domain gbrowser.com is actually registered to Google Inc.
So it seems like Google is going to stirr up the net some more soon by releasing these applications (and maybe others, yet unthought of). One should remember though that a bunch of applications do not make an operating system. In fact, according to OS guru Tanenbaum, such user space application do not even belong to the OS. Having these applications can make users more independent from the operating system they use though. You won’t need Windows any more to start up your Google Browser and write a letter in Gword. If Google succeeds in providing useful web applications that become widely accepted tools, users formerly depending on Windows might switch to other platforms such as Linux or OS X. This is where Google might actually hurt Microsoft. Let’s see where we are going tomorrow.