Google As The Operating System To The Internet

Predictions

from the it's-the-interface dept

Now that everyone is talking about the latest Google-trick where you can easily track FedEx or UPS shipments by typing in the tracking number on Google, one more piece of the puzzle fell into place in the “Google vision.” Over at Business Week, they describe a world where Google is everywhere. Instead of going anywhere online directly, you could just use Google as the interface. Need movie tickets? Type “Movie” and your zip code and see the listings. Want to buy a Beanie Baby on eBay? Type “ebay beanie baby” and have Google show you all the choices. As the article points out, each one of these types of moves could take away traffic from some other site, taking away advertising revenue and giving it to Google. Clearly, Google is trying to become something of an “operating system” for the internet. It’s trying to set it up so that if you want to find anything or run any web application, you go directly to Google and input what you want. It’s a sort of super sophisticated command line interface, where you just need to remember a few simple commands – and let Google’s smarts figure out the rest. It’s an interesting idea, and can certainly appeal to plenty of geeks (including myself). However, there are reasons why the vast majority of people tend to prefer a nice simple graphical user interface rather than a command line – and it will be interesting to see if others (notably Microsoft and Yahoo) figure out a way to appeal to those who are less interested in a command line interface to the world.