这里有个中文版
New Weekly, a popular magazine of the new Chinese middle class, once published a list of twenty cities in China, each with one word describing its essence. The list included:
- Nanjing – the city of “depression”
- Chengdu – the city of “ease”
- Shengzhen – the city of “lust”
While the list may have been just an attempt to capture more readers, it did get me thinking about the one word I would use to describe the essence of each of the big technology companies we all know and love (or not).
So I started with Google (of course), and the first word I thought of was “cool”. Why?
Google was created on a very simple idea: help people find stuff on the Net – easily, instantly and accurately. The first time someone types a few words into Google.com and gets back exactly what they want, it’s the start of a life-long romance. They find themselves “googling” for just about everything, everyday. That simple idea (and one hell of a lot of great technology behind it) has made Google.com a daily habit of hundreds of millions, and made Google the only company in history to have its name become a verb adopted by the masses in many languages around the world.
But there is a lot more “cool” in Google, and my number one favourite is Google Earth. Where Google.com finds stuff on the Net, Google Earth finds stuff on the earth (duh!) – but in immersive 3D. Type in “Beijing” and you will yourself orbiting the planet and descending on top of the Forbidden City. The experience is backed up with detailed satellite imagery covering the globe, high quality GIS data and brilliant animation… and now even 3D street level views! One can’t help but be impressed.
[Though brilliant, Google Earth is not perfect. I found the navigation panel on the left to be difficult to understand and awkward to use. Usability continues to be the bottle neck of most software products and services today.]
Picasa is another “cool” favourite. Unsurprisingly, it’s also about finding stuff, but this time the photos buried in your hard drive. Picasa offers novel ways (like the timeline view) to search, sort and navigate your image library – again in an immersive 3D experience. Microsoft may be trumpeting Windows Vista as the new way to navigate the wealth of data on your PC, but Google’s Picasa is doing it today.
While Google Earth and Picasa are examples software you install, Google hasn’t forgotten its “cool” roots on the web:
And there is just so much more “cool” coming in the near future from Google, including Google Spreadsheet and Google Notebook, web applications to compete with Microsoft Office.
How can so much coolness come out of one company? At a recent conference (ACCU 2005), I attended a session presented by a Google engineer. One could feel him ooze with pride in Google. Not surprising then that Kai-fu Lee jumped ship from Microsoft.
Perhaps it’s something they put in the canteen food (which is free, by the way).
Coming up next… Why Microsoft is “Gigantic”