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Google's Growing Love For the Mac

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-multi-color-apple dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While browsing the 2007 Macworld speaker bios, I found an interesting Google+Mac piece of news. Looks like Google has appointed the famous Amit Singh in charge of their Mac Engineering (also confirmed on Singh's website). While Google generally seems to lag behind in Safari compatibility they have been offering some native Mac software. We earlier heard Google CEO Eric Schmidt's joining Apple's board of directors. Then following Microsoft MacBU's lead, Google started their own Mac Blog a few weeks earlier. Google's jobs website also lists several Mac openings. If Singh's technical expertise and history of OS X wizardry any indication, we can hope for some cool Mac software from Google. Also wondering if all this is just Google's response to Apple's market growth or maybe a more serious partnership is coming? ;-)"

3 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like a good thing to me. by Zarniwoop_Editor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anytime we get wider acceptance of platforms other than Microsoft it is a good thing. It's not that I'm anti-microsoft so much as I prefer to have choices when it comes to computing platforms. Any effort made by companies to support more than just microsoft properly is a good thing in my books.

    --
    - F1 NEWS
    1. Re:Sounds like a good thing to me. by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Web apps are a great thing - if you have reliable, very fast, Internet access 24/7. I suspect the killer app is some hybrid of web and client apps. The data would get still stored locally. Not everyone is comfortable with losing access to data whenever the net goes down, plus the privacy implications and the fact that local storage is faster. As far as the applications themselves, they'll be in Java or some other platform-independent language, but they'll be cached locally for the most part. Again, you wouldn't want to be stuck with a brick when the your net access breaks. Perhaps updates and seldom-used features would download on demand from the net, but things like MS Office more or less do that already.

      Going to all web apps would be going back to the mainframe/dumb terminal days of the 1970s. It would negate most of the advantages of owning a PC.

      -b.

  2. it's all about TV ads and Google PC by boxlight · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The way I see it, Google wants to own the multi-billion dollar TV ad revenue market. And Apple is on the verve of owning the way TV is distributed from the internet to the living room.

    Google + Apple is natch.

    Additionally, Google has been long-rumored to want a "Google PC" -- if I was google I would OEM Mac hardware and ship it with "mom friendly" software that just does email, photos&tv, and web browsing software clients that only run full screen.

    boxlight