The past year has been filled with hits and misses. Stokes of genius and catastrophic botchery. Triumphs of the human spirit, and humble defeat. Inspiring successes and... well you get the idea. Now on the one year anniversary of the creation of the GuysOnFOSS blog, we would like to share our favorite hits and missed from the year past in this
collaborative article
Google Wave
The Thoth
The bigger they are the harder they fall, and what a fall it was for Google. There was so much hype surrounding this open source project that it seemed like everyone simply had to get their hands on an invite (some even going for $70 on ebay!) When I got mine, let me tell you, I was ecstatic. Wave promised to be ‘Email 2.0’. Wave was supposed to change the way people interacted on the internet forever. You could integrate video, pictures, maps, files, and even translate text in real time. How could it fail?
In short, nobody could figure out what to do with it. After all of the anticipation, it turned out to be just another
Nintendo Power Glove. In the past everything that Google released was very self explanatory as to what it actually did. It was obvious what Gmail was, or what Picasa did, but it took Google along time to actually tell us what Wave was for. The early confusion lead to the misuse of the product among the many beta testers. People were unclear on how to integrate it into their lives. This misuse turned Wave into a weird IM tool with hundreds of clutter inducing messages all over the page. It was difficult with the Wave not being organized in chronological order. When Google had designated the product it was not intended to be used in such a way. Throw in bots, all making their own comments and things got hectic and messy very quickly. Google later came out with a handy little start menu (see picture)
This menu was supposed to suggest to people what they were supposed to do with Wave, but it was too little too late, as many of their users had already tested Wave and left. Perhaps under different circumstances, Wave could have worked. There were also a lot of other problems with Wave (For example, the scroll bar was messed up) but in my opinion, that is not why Google ultimately failed, as I think these problems would have been fixed eventually as the product moved out of beta.
Google Buzz
Systemtwo
Social networking has become one of the most used service on the net. Due to this, everyone wants a part of it. Of course, not everyone has been ultimately successful with implementing their site. Some are duplicates of popular items like
Facebook,
Myspace, ect. Buzz, Google’s idea of
Twitter with their own branding was is an example of one of those failed ideas. Although there was a large banner like page that appeared when you signed on, not many were sure what to do with such a thing. An almost identical copy of Twitter, no-one wanted to update their status onto two sites with signing on and such. For me, I don’t use any social networking for the purpose they were designed for. I find that the act of posting your current action is quite impractical and not intelligent at all. Any good googler could search for you and determine where you live, eat, shop, and the list goes on. Is it useful? In my opinion, it is useless. Duplicates of a service (that do nothing but copy it, with no improvements) should be deleted immediately, for quite a number of reasons, such confusing users to what social networking is. Also it will help with the IPv4 problem. :)
Dell
The Thoth
For a while now, Dell has been doing a little bit of experimentation with desktop Linux. They have been offering Ubuntu pre-installed on a select few (very select) laptops and desktops. I think this is a [baby] step in the right direction. Although I think desktop Linux still isn’t completely ready, I think that it is approaching a point where it is a viable option for people who are frustrated with the current woes of MS. That is where Dell steps in. By offering Linux pre-installed, they remove much of the smoke and mirrors surrounding Linux and give Linux the opportunity to grow. We have always been painfully aware of the vicious circle which has kept Desktop Linux out of the mainstream: No software is developed because not enough people use it in their daily lives, People don’t use it in their daily lives because there is no software developed (when I say “no software” I am only really speaking about commercial applications which people require to do crucial tasks like taxes or banking). Dell is helping to break the cycle by giving folks the option to try something new which in turn will draw the game manufacturers and whatnot to Linux. Dell’s execution, however, is dreadful, for instance when I was looking on their website to find the amount of money one would save by going with the free software as opposed to Windows and MS office , I found something rather shocking: The amount of money you’d save on a popular Desktop pc (
Studio XPS 7100) was $-9. That is not a typo. It cost YOU money to get free software on your computer instead of Windows. Another problem is that Dell has been put under a lot of pressure from, you guessed it, MS, to keep the copies of 7 rolling out. Remember when Dell told it’s customers that Linux is “more secure” than Windows? Ya, that comment went missing very quickly from their webpage. To be fair to them,
this page still puts Ubuntu in a very favorable light, without directly comparing it to Windows. As mentioned above, they offer so few PCs with Ubuntu installed that it is hardly worth it, plus they hide them so well on their website it would be almost impossible for someone who didn’t already know that Dell offed this service that Linux was even an option. In conclusion, I think that Dell’s actions and medium success will force other manufacturers to offer something similar. This in turn will further develop desktop Linux as people realize it’s potential. We will just have to wait and see what the future holds.
Koffice
Crazy2be
So i discovered koffice. It’s awesome, because it has a sidebar. I was going to write an online-base word processor like that, and discovered koffice which was basically exactly what i was envisioning. Awesome. Bye.
Well, thats it for this year. Hopefully next year is just as good to GuysOnFOSS as this year was. Thank you all for reading over the past 365 days, feel free to leave us a message in the comment section ;)
