Tech Chatter

May 4, 2009

(continued)

Everyone is wondering where Google is going.  It's the big question for the fast moving company.  Will they slow down?  They've become such a force in the world.  To find out something, you just 'Google' it. 

Recently with the flu epidemic their vast resource has been used to track the flu before the patient sought any medical help.  That's right.... they found that the flu worry led people to search for symptoms in areas where the flu had yet to appear and BEFORE it hit international news.

Google is also creeping up on trying to implement a Microsoft Office type offering, but completely web based.  You can use the early releases of this now.  It appears that it will need a lot of work to catch up to the ingrained Word, Power Point and Excel from Microsoft.

Google should not be discounted, however, as they have done a lot beyond their search engine.  YouTube is a good example of their ability to go get the right thing at the right time.  Microsoft seems to be a half step behind them.

(next column)

04/05/2009 10:10 PM

They are not perfect, however and they do take false steps, but they recover quickly.  They are getting awfully big.  Can they sustain innovation or will they reach a peak.  They have to  deal with Microsoft and all the venture capital based startups.  One or more of them will come on strong in the future too.

One thing that makes transition easier happens to be Vista.  Lots of old programs don't load on Vista.  I keep a bunch of older machines around running XP Professional and Home addition just to have access to these handy programs. 

In the process of doing this, we find that we can use some of Google's free offerings and get by with them. Our advice to you, however, is not to junk your XP machines until you're really sure that all your programs load on Vista.  Guess what?  Some will load on one Vista Machine and not on another.  These programs are for the most part over ten years old and have a lot of miles on them.