Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has some interesting comments about the Flickr deal. He shares some insight into the future of the MSN/Google/Yahoo competition.
I think there are some important changes underway for the internet. For years the Web has been loosely connected in a very static, impersonal fashion. That’s changing.
Google changed the way we find information on the web. But that was only the beginning. Now we’re sharing information and content with services like Flickr, Blogs are giving us personalized routes to information and letting individuals dynamically reshape the connections between here and there, RSS is making it easier to consume information, and search technologies are getting better and more pervasive.
Later on I’ll talk about why I think AJAX-like development could be the next “big thing” for the web after RSS and blogging. The funny thing is, I was thinking this for months… but that article seems to have brought that realization to the blogosphere – and helped me understand a bit more about how this stuff actually works.
What got me thinking about services-as-web-apps? The suggestion of a “Google OS”. I never thought that meant that Google would start coming on computers instead of Windows… No, I think Google is thinking bigger than that. If they aren’t, someone should be.
.NET and Java gave us the promise of platform-independence… sort of. Web applications take that idea a lot farther.
I don’t think Google is going to release an OS to replace Windows anytime soon. But they might make which OS (or even what kind of device) you’re using a lot less important.