‘See when you on top, mother fuckers just want to bring you down. Mother fuckers don’t even know you they don’t like you.’
-My Downfall, Notorious BIG
Google’s awesome and everything I’m not for a second going to deny that—though I’m far too attached to Firefox to make the switch to Chrome it seems by all accounts to be a nice piece of software. Why am I too attached to Firefox? Add-ons.
What makes Windows great is the endless applications available for it. A rich tapestry of millions, millions of applications. People love to bash Microsoft at every opportunity, but truth is, they are just as awesome as Google. Sure they can’t make a decent browser to save their life, they’ve released countless applications that were lame, bug ridden and fell by the wayside. That guy who got that Zune tattoo had it removed. They’ve been known to strong arm partners and put the squeeze on their competitors. Regardless, make no mistake, they are awesome. What makes them awesome is as Ballmer famously exclaimed: Developers, developers, developers.
This is also what makes the iPhone awesome. It’s what makes Firefox awesome. It’s what makes Windows awesome. These systems would be fairly sweet without a plethora of third party functionality but it’s this plethora that makes them truly, undeniably, definitively: awesome. Pry them from my dead hands awesome.
Google doesn’t seem to be totally hip to this way of doing things. I’m not saying they won’t be later, but so far, it doesn’t seem like they really ‘get’ it completely yet. Take Google Analytics for example, the insanely popular traffic monitoring tool. They are just now releasing a public beta API for exporting your analytics data. For years that data was trapped and there was no way to interface with the service. Want to write applications for Google Apps using your favorite programming language? No problem, as long as your favorite programming language is Python.
I’m a web developer and have been for sometime now. I think in web. Nonetheless, I don’t see a large market for a browser OS anytime soon. Niche sure, M$ killer. I don’t think so. Add that to the fact that Google isn’t a super developer friendly company really, and Microsoft is much wiser and easier going then they used to be and you’ve got a bunch of hoopla for fluff.
You want irony? Google Chrome isn’t even available for Linux yet which is to be the base of the new Google Chrome operating system.
And Windows 7? Everyone says it looks, well, awesome.
yet