Few interesting announcements this week

Google made a few interesting announcements this week. First, Google Docs Viewer support for a sheaf of new document types, including Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop and PostScript. Second, Chrome’s new ability to run background apps that run seamlessly and invisibly behind the browser. Third, they released Google Cloud Connect, which lets Windows users sync Office documents to Google Docs. They as well announced the Android 3.0 SDK – but in spite of the ongoing tablet hysteria, eventually, the first three are more important.

Google’s long-term strategy seems to be to supplant Microsoft by first building the best browser, at that time making it easy to move your files to Google Docs … and in short, slowly now inexorably, making Windows and Office irrelevant. Clearly no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime before long; yet as cloud computing grows more ubiquitous, Google steadily iterates feature afterwards feature, and people grow accustomed to working in the browser, then and there one day, like as not only a couple of years from however, a whole lot of people – and businesses – will begin to think to themselves “Hey, we haven’t to tell the truth needed Windows or Office in months. Why do we even have them at all?”

The “network computer” dumb-terminal approach has failed many times earlier … however so did Six Degrees, Tribe.net, Friendster, and MySpace, previously Facebook came along. The original iMac was roundly criticized because it didn’t have a floppy drive, criticism that but sounds hilariously stupid. We might look back at the first Chrome OS notebook in much the same way. Clearly, Chrome can’t to tell the truth compete with Windows until always-on broadband Internet access reaches the same level of reliability and ubiquity as electricity itself; yet that’s only a matter of time. In the early days of electricity, every factory had its own power plant, and its managers would have been appalled by the notion of outsourcing that vital engine – but before long enough those inefficient installations were replaced by today’s electrical grid. Computing power is the new electricity, and cloud computing is the new grid.

Unlike most companies, when Google says “cloud”, they mean it. Compare Amazon’s cloud-computing service to Google’s. With the former, you in essence call up and configure one or more servers with the OS and specifications of your choice; however with Google’s App Engine, you don’t know anything about its hardware or operating system, because that no longer matters. It just runs the code you give it, and you don’t much care how. Similarly, Chrome is being built for a future where the ambient, omnipresent wireless Internet connects  everything from clothes to computers to cars and it doesn’t much matter what OS any given device is running.