Buahaha, I love conversations like this, especially about Google. There are a number of Google products I love and use, due to the fact that they don't make their existance known wildly on your computer. Like when AIM has those extremely annoying animated ads on the top that play SOUNDS automatically. Oh my god that is annoying, and sometimes freaks me out. I also recently played with OSX Tiger on my friends new Apple and happened to love the Spotlight feature, oh I hope WinFS makes it into Windows Vista, but guess what, I can have something that's almost identical. mmmm, Google Desktop search, it sits down in my taskbar just like spotlight and gives me live results without me even hitting enter. I lovvvee it. As soon as Google Talk has some sort of file transfer feature, it'll be a god send. I'm so sick and tired of ALL the other clients. They make you know they are there, they want to be seen and look pretty. The way the windows dock, and just how small they minimal they are. It's sit there quietly, just doing what it's supposed, whilst MSN Messenger for some reason wants you to use it oh so badly and constantly bugs you about and just won't go away without a registry hack. I don't want you MSN Messenger, why can't I just click a button and make you go away. One final thing I love about the little simple programs they produce, the install routines. So tiny and quick, I don't need some big long process that sets a restore point and seems to take forever to do what should take a few seconds.
Don't get me wrong, I like Microsoft and the things they have produced and producing, but I honestly think they need to take their place and Google has their place in the market. I like Google Search, because I hit the site, it loads instantly, I search and results load instantly and google doesn't make itself known, it lets you use Google search for as little of time possible and gets you to the results and onto the content you were looking for quickly. If I hit MSN, it loads how many images and how many news story that I simple just don't care about. Google doesn't combine everything into one large service that tries to do everything from one location, they provide seperate services that fulfil what they were designed to do, and nothing else. They then connect the services so they share information. That's what I love.
Again, I can't wait for Vista, as I'm becoming jealous of OSX users.
Pheeew.
[edit]It's kind of like Google has the same mindset as
http://tinyapps.org Grrreeeattt site, "Smaller is Better"[/edit]
P4 2.4Ghz HT, 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 128MB, 19" Samsung SyncMaster 997DF, 80GB HD