The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5)

Google's Picasa

Can anyone tell me why Google went into this:

http://www.picasa.com/google/ ?

"Picasa. Everything you need to enjoy your digital photos in a single software product".
Are they trying to fortify their position against microsoft?

Janonymous
Saturday, July 24, 2004

D'oh. Link problem crap bug thing.
http://www.picasa.com/google

Janonymous
Saturday, July 24, 2004

It is always very "funny" to see people try to explain software companies strategies only by their "need to fortify their position against Microsoft"?

IMHO, Google is trying to make more money. Picasa can be their trojan for an all-Internet digital photo service including archiving (1GB is more than enough for a family album), printing, sharing, and more. They'll put some ads here and there, and the project will be a commercial success.

Later, when image recognition techniques will be available, they will show you ads according to the photos you have stored. But I guess that I am doing too much SciFi here :-)

GinG
Saturday, July 24, 2004

Some more sci-fi digital photo stuff:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14275

Thom Lawrence
Saturday, July 24, 2004

I am still trying to figure out how great technology companies, take Apple for example, who, some argue has the best OS and produces high-quality computer hardware, markets stuff like iTunes and the iPod as if it is their only product. I could be wrong, but I just dont see how a fancy music thingy is step towards advancing computing technology.

Berlin Brown
Saturday, July 24, 2004

Because the iPod is outselling the iMac & G5 put together?

www.MarkTAW.com
Saturday, July 24, 2004

Sellouts

Berlin Brown
Saturday, July 24, 2004

but then again, you do what you have to do to survive

Berlin Brown
Saturday, July 24, 2004

They are also using this software at http://www.blogger.com - to upload photos to the site.
If you want to upload photos to your blog they tell you that the best way is to download this tool.

NotABlogger
Saturday, July 24, 2004

If you look at companies that stand the test of time many are doing things now that are very different than when they started. As one columnist recently observed, Apple will be regarded as a music company and not a computer company in a few years.

Yukon
Sunday, July 25, 2004

"If you look at companies that stand the test of time many are doing things now that are very different than when they started. As one columnist recently observed, Apple will be regarded as a music company and not a computer company in a few years."

Kinda like how General Electric is known as a TV company.

Er, no. Apple *may* end up a "music" company, but then again, Microsoft isn't known as a 'cable news' company just because of MSNBC.

It depends on what happens with Apple's other businesses in the next few years.

I doubt they could really run their business on just the iTunes music store and iPods. iPods are probably a time-limited market niche, which could disappear in 5-10 years, or become just generally unprofitable. (Kinda like the PDA.)

They don't really make any money on the store, either. Apple would have to start up their own music publishing unit, and sign bands directly, in order to get a larger chunk of the revenue from the iTunes store.

And that's unlikely because they already have enough trouble from Apple Corps, the old Beatles label, which has sued Apple Computer for getting into the music biz.

Jon Hendry
Sunday, July 25, 2004

Nobidy mention that Picasa is actually a damn good piece of software? Much better than the rubbish that gets packaged with digital cameras.

Yanwoo
Sunday, July 25, 2004

Check out http://www.hello.com -- it's part of Picasa offering. A lot more in line with Google than the desktop software.

Picasa is actually a pretty good image organization program. It's pretty intuitive and easy to use for a not very computer-savvy user.

igor
Monday, July 26, 2004