The month of November kicks off with wide-ranging chatter about new Google products designed to clobber Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Palm and other industry giants.
First, everyone is talking about the "Google PC" and the "Google Phone." We know almost everything about the Google PC (Note: the name Google PC is mine and is not an official designation) and almost nothing about the Google Phone, which should be unveiled later in the month.
The Google PC is a $200 PC built by Taiwan's Everex called the gPC that has just shown up at Wal-Mart stores. The PC runs not Microsoft Windows or Office, but instead a Linux variant called gOS, which emphasizes Google applications, sites and services. It's also marketed as environmentally friendly.
I expect the OpenSocial initiative. Your eyes may glaze over at the announcement of a set of application programming interfaces -- basically an interface for developers to use for writing software applications -- but the initiative will surely change the world. It means at minimum that instead of going from Friendster to Linked-In to Plaxo to whatever other "social" sites you frequent to check in on friends and make changes to your pages, you'll be able to do so from a single place. Your favorite social network can become all your social networks.
As recently as October, Facebook was the flavor of the month. But OpenSocial leaves that social network as the odd man out and provides an incentive for developers to stop building Facebook applications, which work only on Facebook, and start building OpenSocial applications, which will work on dozens of sites.
For Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Palm and others, "Google Month" brings unwelcome competition and price pressure.
But for end users, announcements during "Google Month" mean potentially cheaper and easier computing and communication.
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