more about the article from TOI :
Google’s new
‘killer’
application
*img75.imageshack.us/img75/3963/getimage3ex.jpg
Google is out with its latest offering—a bundle of myriad software. But the seemingly invincible company has made a mistake with Google Pack, says Charles Assisi
Last week at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, search engine major Google announced the launch of Google Pack. A press release issued by the company described it as “a free collection of safe, useful software from Google and other companies…� For various reasons, computer users across the world sat up and took notice. The most pertinent one being that virtually every offering from Google in the past has brought enormous value to end users. This one though, is terribly, terribly disappointing. There is nothing in it that improves your life. At best, it proves that Google is human after all. It too, can make mistakes.
To get a sense of why this bundle is so disappointing, head to *pack.google.com and take a good look at the offering. Some of it is developed by Google. The others come from third-party vendors like Adobe Reader 7 (a software to read .pdf files) and RealPlayer (to view video and listen to audio)—which in any case
was freely available off the internet..
The trouble starts right from the time you decide to download the software. While the process itself is painless and automated, inexperienced users will inadvertently end up permitting all of it to load when their PC starts up. The impact it has on a PC’s performance is ridiculous. It slows the contraption down and takes a horribly long time to start performing at optimum levels.
Then there are problems that exist with individual pieces of software in the bundle. Though you’re led to believe it is free, it isn’t entirely. Take something like Norton, an anti-virus software embedded into the bundle. It’s free only for the first six months. After that, you’ve got to start paying to use updated versions of it.
Or for that matter take something like RealPlayer. It’s a nice player to have because it supports virtually all kinds of known audio and video file formats. But it’s too cumbersome. To start with, you need to register to use it. The registration is painful. If you’re willing to ignore the pain there, RealPlayer still won’t let you forget. It insists on throwing all kinds of pop up messages at you reminding you to do something or the other. Worse still, the free version has some features disabled. Try buying the premium version and you’ll be hard pressed trying to find where you can do that from even on the Real Player site. If all of this doesn’t get to you, GalleryPlayer will. Apparently, this software puts together some of the world’s finest art and photography into a high definition format. What Google Pack delivers are samples of some images from the GalleryPlayer. If you need the high resolution stuff, you need to buy each of the images. Quaint!
As far as all of the other software in the bundle goes, most of it has been in the public domain for a long time and virtually every seasoned computer user has a version of it. To that extent, no surprises!
To be fair to Google though, this is only a beta version. Over the next couple of months, expect a more complete package. For instance, if Open Office, a free software suite that allows users to create documents, spreadsheets and presentation templates like Microsoft Office does is included, it may just end up being a killer app. And in the Indian context, a word of caution! Downloading all of this can hog a lot of bandwidth. TNN
What the pack contains
Adobe Reader 7: Software to read .pdf files
Ad-Aware SE Personal: Anti spyware software
GalleryPlayer HD Images: View high definition images
Google Desktop: A tool to search your PC
Google Earth: An application that lets you view the
earth
Google Pack Screensaver: Create customised screensavers
Google Talk: An instant messenger
Google Toolbar: Adds search functionality to Internet Explorer
Mozilla Firefox: An internet browser
Norton AntiVirus: Anti virus software
Picasa: Helps manage digital pictures
RealPlayer: View audio and video files
Trillian: An instant messenger allow communication across all messengers