Google

Details are sketchy but Google is finally throwing their huge sombrero into the Operating System ring. After years of surveying the competition and developing online versions of all the popular office applications, Google is now going to tackle the foundation of the PC platform. We know it will be a new windowing system that will run on a Linux kernel. It will also be completely open source (the GPL wins again).

There are several obvious things that will happen here. Google is going to put it’s considerable marketing muscle behind getting Netbooks to use Chrome as the default instead of various other flavors of Linux. Microsoft is going to push these same vendors to use Windows 7 instead. Google is going to price this thing rock bottom, in all likelihood it will be a free download. Couple that with Snow Leopard’s ridiculously low upgrade price and it becomes clear that this OS cycle consumers are going to be the big winners.

I have long maintained that the only thing stopping Linux from becoming a viable desktop OS is that design (UI/UX or otherwise) doesn’t work by committee. But the community is perhaps the single most important part of the open source movement. By putting Google designers in charge of figuring out the windowing system Chrome is probably going to be the first linux flavor to be genuinely polished from a UI perspective (Even though Doug Bowman might disagree).

There is one big problem though. I can’t use it. Not as my primary OS anyway.

Google say the only way developers will build applications for it is through web technologies, taking a page out of Apple’s iPhone 1.0 marketing spiel. Given enough bandwidth you might be able to get away without access to the internals of the PC but as long as there is a need to run compiled code for applications/games like Photoshop or Fallout 3 this is not going to be my OS of choice. It will however be perfect for any number of people that just want a computer that does their email and web stuff. Throw in the occasional flash game for good luck.

Cower in fear Microsoft, this is the moment Balmer has been sweating for years (literally). Maybe Microsoft should sue Google for monopolistic tactics. After all, you can’t install a competing web browser when the OS is the web browser.

While pondering the effects of Google on the way facts and information are assimilated I realized that I’ve almost entirely stopped learning details. My memory now consists of search terms rather than the actual information. I remember the minimum necessary to be able to locate the item the next time around. The details live in Google. 

I don’t even bookmark, I have some timesavers linked on my bookmark bar in Safari but those are really url shortcuts. The more I think about it, this is not because I’m lazy or forgetful (though I am definitely both those things). I genuinely believe Google can find something faster and more effectively than I can thumbing through bookmarks. Consider the pitfalls of a bookmark:

1. The page’s location might change
2. The information contained on the page might no longer be accurate
3. The very same search might yield a better, newer method of doing the same thing or reveal new information that was previously unavailable

So not only is it faster than finding a bookmark, it’s also more accurate and more up to date.

This got me thinking about a specific instance where what I had been taught in school turned out to be wrong. I was taught that gravity is a force that is based on the mass of two objects. The larger the mass, the stronger the force. Right? Well, sure it’s right but it turns out it isn’t a force at all according to a certain Albert Einstein. That text book didn’t contain the whole story and the facts weren’t updated later on in my memory. I had to discover this through Wikipedia and Google. The fact that Ekta and I just had a kid has made this lapse in the education system all the more troubling. 

Is it possible that rather than learning that information in school I could have been taught the basics of how gravity works and then just taught how to look it up in Google when I want the details?

I always drop down into what I understand best when testing out an idea, so obviously I go straight into software programming terrain. The knowledge of when and why to use a technique (like say, recursive loops) is much more important than the exact syntax to do so for a given programming language. So broad concepts are much more important than the actual technical minutiae. Knowledge of what to use is much more important than specific details of how to use it. Knowing how to drive a car is more important than knowing how every part of it works. When you need that information it’s always available through Google. What this amounts to is a kind of Knowledge Abstraction facilitated by Google. 

Google allows us this luxury because of 3 important things. Firstly, it is everywhere. I can access it anywhere on a suitable web device thanks to ubiquitous networking. Secondly, it is convenient, I’m not lugging around the Encyclopedia. Third, it is really fast, so the time spent hunting through documents on my hard disk or worse, the index of a book is gone. In almost magical fashion this means I don’t need to remember specific facts but at the same time know more than I did before. 

I firmly believe that our kids should be taught language, math and searching at the lowest level because knowing how to access information effectively is probably as important as being able to read a sentence. It is the internet age equivalent of learning how to count and is just as important for that kid’s success. Teachers need to concentrate on teaching large, broad concepts and let the kids explore the details. They would effectively abstract the world and how it works from the technical details. The kids will probably find out what they love to do and branch off in directions of learning that would otherwise have been inaccessible. They will not be limited by the text book or the teacher’s own knowledge.

Search for SCO on Google and the results are fairly indicative of how powerful Groklaw is.

On a side note I got married three days ago. I don’t feel different yet. Maybe the honeymoon will fix that.