Slashdot Mirror
Google Opens U.K. Cybercafe and Testing Lab
sebFlyte writes "Google has launched a new venture in England to go with its London offices. They've set up a free Web cafe style affair at London's Heathrow airport to help travelers claw back some of the many hours they spend aimlessly wandering round airport lounges. They're not doing it entirely selflessly though: they admit the main reason they're doing it is to get as wide and as large a cross section of people through the centre as they can so that they can then watch them interact with Google's Web applications. ZDNet has photos, too."
It's ideas like this that make people not mind when google wants a lot of information about you. All those people who will cry "If this was microsoft you would hate it" - microsoft collates it's data surrepticiously, every webpage you visit or email you write. offereing a free web cafe and saying "but we will watch you" in public no less, is a good thing. I can hardly see anyone looking up anything they wouldn't want anybody to know about anyway at a public terminal
If they switch Operating Systems altogether, they'll probably lose a ton of users, seeing as most associate Windows with computers. If average users see Firefox, most likely they'll feel like it's unfamiliar and feel a bit edgy about it, but to use a different OS altogether? That in itself would put off a lot of people in one move.
The 10 Samsung laptops in the temporary installation will be manned from 0700 to 1900 by Google employees from across the organisation, with some flown in especially to help out.
Take a look at this photo and all the sudden it makes sense...
Footnote:
- Meta google story analysis.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I am always glad to see companies being less than ruthlessly hardnosed, but even so perhaps are we now expecting companies to be 'entirely selfless'? Sounds like the Slashdot community has been reading too much Karl Marx...
This is just a temporary booth that will run for only two months with only ten computers. Any one of dozens of other companies could have done something similar promoting music, cars, books, mobiles, even candy bars, etc, etc., instead of the internet. This Google venture comes over as a rather tacky and ephermeral trade/marketing stand and the Slashdot headline is completely misleading, imho.
The place is awash with stories about Google taking over the world and putting the fear of god into corporate behemoths everywhere. But take a hard look at what Google is actually doing rather than what analysts are saying. Google is a not very large company which runs the world's best search/advertising engine and has a number of frankly rather modest beta projects going. And that is all. In many ways, Google has yet to prove itself. Sooner or later, the Google boys and girls are going to have to come out with some aggressive killer moves or folks might just conclude that the story is a soap opera about California cool with, alas, little more substance than a completely crazy stock price.
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C'mon now. What they're doing is testing Google apps, not putting machines out there for general use. Most people are familiar with the Google interface. Type something in, press the button, presto! Results! Browsers aren't all that different either. You really only absolutely need four interface widgets: back, forward, home, and the location bar. Simple! Also considering that there are only staff members manning the cafe, you would think their time would be better spent assisting the folks in the cafe, not troubleshooting machines. Why bother with crashing, pop ups, and such? Deploy everything on a safe, stable platform and insure a good user experience.
They track you already with their cookies if you use Google services. But this way, they can tell what proportion of your surfing that usage is. Plus loads of other stuff like how many pages of Google results you read before you try the same search on Yahoo!, whether you have a personalised Yahoo! homepage but not a Google one, etc.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Actually, my experience has been that if I sit someone in front of a Linux desktop running Firefox, they don't even think much about the difference, they just use it. People are focused on the web page itself, not the browser interface that's framing it. That's the beauty of the web: the platform is irrelevant.