Yesterday, Google announced its Google Video Store, which will sell thousands of downloads, including recent television broadcasts of popular CBS shows and professional basketball games, as well as vintage episodes from series that went off the air decades ago. The video providers have the option of offering content on a download-to-own or download-to-rent basis. In contrast to iTunes, Google Video will allow content owners to set their own prices.
Although this is exciting news, I am also a bit worried by this announcement. Google will use its own flavor of DRM (Google DRM) to protect this video content, if its owner desires to do so. This makes that these videos can only be viewed using Google's proprietary viewer and cannot be transferred to any mobile device like Apple's iPod Video. That in itself may be acceptable, but not the fact that Google only supports the Microsoft platform.
Google also announced its Google Pack, a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It contains several Google applications such as Google Earth, Google Picasa, Google ScreenSaver and Google Desktop, as well as several third party applications like the Firefox browser, Norton AntiVirus software and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. But again, the Google Pack is only available for Windows XP users. And although the FAQs of the individual Google applications mention that they might consider Mac support in the future, nothing is said about Linux.
This kind of bugs me, especially because Google is known for running its thousands of servers under Linux and making valuable contributions to the Open Source community. But if even Google chooses to support only the dominant platform, others are unlikely to act differently. As argued in my previous post, such behavior will seriously limit the success of the Linux Desktop. So, for what it is worth I would like to call upon Google to live up to its motto 'Don't be evil' and bring its applications and services to other major platforms (Mac and Linux) as soon as possible, thus enabling true competition at the platform level.
Postscript [12/1/06]: Today, Google released a Mac version of Google Earth, so it may indeed live up to its promise to consider Mac support for its applications in the future.
Although this is exciting news, I am also a bit worried by this announcement. Google will use its own flavor of DRM (Google DRM) to protect this video content, if its owner desires to do so. This makes that these videos can only be viewed using Google's proprietary viewer and cannot be transferred to any mobile device like Apple's iPod Video. That in itself may be acceptable, but not the fact that Google only supports the Microsoft platform.
Google also announced its Google Pack, a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It contains several Google applications such as Google Earth, Google Picasa, Google ScreenSaver and Google Desktop, as well as several third party applications like the Firefox browser, Norton AntiVirus software and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. But again, the Google Pack is only available for Windows XP users. And although the FAQs of the individual Google applications mention that they might consider Mac support in the future, nothing is said about Linux.
This kind of bugs me, especially because Google is known for running its thousands of servers under Linux and making valuable contributions to the Open Source community. But if even Google chooses to support only the dominant platform, others are unlikely to act differently. As argued in my previous post, such behavior will seriously limit the success of the Linux Desktop. So, for what it is worth I would like to call upon Google to live up to its motto 'Don't be evil' and bring its applications and services to other major platforms (Mac and Linux) as soon as possible, thus enabling true competition at the platform level.
Postscript [12/1/06]: Today, Google released a Mac version of Google Earth, so it may indeed live up to its promise to consider Mac support for its applications in the future.
