Google has just released an alternative homepage to their usual minimalist theme. It has fully customizable content and layout and several nice themes to choose from. The functionality is really awesome. I can now have all my blog feeds, news headlines, weather, and other widgets sitting in one place. You can try it out here.
You realise that google is going to take over the world, don’t you? As a friend of mine once put it: The future is a black sky, everything on the ground burnt to ashes – and amidst all of this, one tall skyscraper with the words “google” written at the top.
What do you think is the motivation behind Google offering so many free services such as this? I’d be interested to hear from people who actually use this stuff if they feel that they are paying in any way for the privilege.
Interstingly, I attended a seminar a couple of days ago by Ben Appleton, who works as a software engineer at Google Labs in Darling Harbour. He shed some light onto this question. He said that the Google business model isn’t money-centric. Rather than decide what technologies they need to build in order to make money, they instead try to make the coolest possible technologies and then figure out afterwards how to make money from it. A good example is Google Maps, which is immensely popular, but costs Google a lot of money. Needless to say, once you have many users relient on this technology it’s easy to come up with ways to make some cash from it. As for the new customizable homepage I wrote about in the post, here the motivation is more straightforward – it increases the likelihood that people will use the Google search engine if they use the Goodle frontpage.
I think it has to do with the CEO’s and their motto for the company “Don’t be evil” as well. They seem to be genuinely nice guys (at least in public).