Tag Archives | Google

Bad Revue: Logitech’s Google TV Box Suffers From “Negative Sales”

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 28, 2011 at 2:19 pm

How is Logitech’s Revue–the first stand-alone Google TV box–selling? Logitech says sales are “slightly negative.” As in, more Revue boxes are coming back to Logitech than are being bought and used by consumers. I feel the company’s pain, but I’m not surprised by the bad news. I like the idea of Google TV, but when I tried the Revue last October, I found its software horrifically rough around the edges, to the point that it was no fun at all. Logitech has knocked the price down from $249 to $99, but a shaky product is a shaky product no matter what the price is.

As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out, the Revue is an example of a trend I cover in my new TIME.com Technologizer column: products which ship even though they’re clearly not ready to ship. I don’t know the Revue’s backstory–and tend to think that Logitech may have been as surprised by anyone at how iffy the Google TV software is. But reviewers like me and early adopters who bought the Revue found it lacking, and told other people. Is there any way that Google TV’s chances at success wouldn’t have been a lot higher if Google had finished it six months or a year later and invested the extra time in creating something that pundits and real people would have loved?

 

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Google Wants to Speed You Up

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 28, 2011 at 8:29 am

Google thinks the Web should be faster. It’s a constant theme at its media events, and is reflected in its decisions about its search engine, Android, and other products.  And it’s announcing Google Page Speed Service, a new service which aims to help other sites pick up the pace. Page Speed Service will wedge itself between an existing site and the Web, and will rewrite the site’s code on the fly to optimize it for speed. It’s not intuitively obvious that this would work–wouldn’t the rewriting process eat up part of any gains realized?–but Google says that it’s seen improvements of 25% to 60% in some cases.

Just for yuks, I ran Page Speed Service’s tests on Technologizer. It said that the optimized version of this site was 1.9 percent faster than the current one, but also said that the optimized one was slower in other respects. (The video comparison of existing Technologizer vs. optimized Technologizer–which you can view here–does make the optimized one look snappier.)

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Gmail Users on the New Gmail

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 25, 2011 at 3:49 pm

I continue to like the new version of Gmail which Google is letting users sample (at least in part) by switching to a new theme. One of the things I like best about it is that it’s not packed to the point of illegibility with messages, options, menu bars, and sidebar items. Google aired the interface out with a lot more white space, and for me, at least, that makes for a far more pleasant, efficient experience. So I’m slightly worried by Google’s report on initial overall response to the new version:

What you like

  • The clean and minimalist look of the new design
  • Seeing a consistent “look” across Google products

“The new Preview theme is wonderful! It’s clean and crisp, easy to read and really focused on the one thing that matters most in Gmail — the mail! Thanks!”

What you want to change

  • Too much whitespace and not enough information (though interestingly, many people reported that they appreciated to lower information density after a while)
  • Not enough contrast
  • Darker theme options

Fine by me if there’s a dense version and a lighter, airier one. (There already is–the new theme is available in two variants.) But for purely selfish reasons, I hope that Google doesn’t react to the “Too much whitespace” feedback by cramming more stuff back onto the page. My eyeballs are very happy with the new look just the way it is.

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I Tried to Love Samsung’s Chromebook. I Failed

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 25, 2011 at 10:52 am

Last Thursday morning, as I packed for a three-day trip to San Diego for Comic-Con, I couldn’t decide whether to take my trusty first-generation MacBook Air, or use the trip as an excuse to review Samsung’s Series 5 Chromebook, which I’d just received. So I didn’t decide–I took both.

And then, once I’d arrived at the airport, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring the Air’s AC adapter. The Blogging Gods clearly wanted me to try the Series 5, one of the first commercially-available devices that runs Google’s Chrome OS.

The notion of using a laptop purely as a window to the Web–which is the Chrome OS proposition–isn’t inherently unappealing to me. (In fact, I tried to do just that back in 2008, in a project I called Operation Foxbook, long before Google announced Chrome OS.) Using Google’s first Chromebook, last year’s experimental CR-48, had left me more skeptical about Chrome OS rather than less so. But I still want to be impressed with a truly Web-centric computing device. Sadly, my time with the Series 5 at Comic-Con was frustrating in multiple ways. Google and its hardware partners are selling Chromebooks to the public at prices which aren’t lower than those for similar Windows laptops, but the Series 5, like the CR-48,still feels like an experiment.

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The Google Toolbar: Superfluous? Probably. Beloved? Definitely!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 22, 2011 at 2:28 pm

Stephen Shankland of Cnet is reporting that Google has ceased development of the Google Toolbar for Firefox. It works on versions of the browser up to 4, but won’t ever run with the new version 5 and beyond. Google’s official rationale? Firefox has added features which render the toolbar irrelevant. On a purely rational level, it may be right about that. But I suspect the absence of a Google Toolbar for the world’s second most-used browser will send a lot of people into a tizzy.

Three years ago, when Google’s Chrome browser was brand new, I wrote about the fact that there was no Google Toolbar for it. Then as now, you could have made the case that the toolbar was superflous, but that didn’t stop people from really, really wanting a Google Toolbar for Chrome. The post got a ton of readers, and I followed up with one on my not-very-serious project to build a Google Fakebar.

People like doing things the way they’re comfortable doing them. (That’s the only plausible explanation for why it’s still possible to pay for AOL service.) And Google Toolbar was so useful for so long that here are probably millions of people out there who use it every single day on Firefox.

Shankland says that Google isn’t saying anything about the future of the toolbar for Internet Explorer. I wonder if there are people so wedded to the toolbar that they’d switch from Firefox to IE to keep it?

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Google Labs is Closing? That’s Unthinkable–Whether or Not It’s a Good Idea

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 20, 2011 at 1:05 pm

Shock and sadness are not emotions I’m used to experiencing when I read the corporate blog of a large tech company. But those are the ones I felt as I read this post at Google’s official blog:

Last week we explained that we’re prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we’ve decided to wind down Google Labs. While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead.

In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments—in others we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market. We’ll update you on our progress via the Google Labs website.

We’ll continue to push speed and innovation—the driving forces behind Google Labs—across all our products, as the early launch of the Google+ field trial last month showed.

Google, a company that’s famous for letting engineers work on idiosyncratic side projects, has decided that idiosyncratic side projects are a bad idea? It’s unthinkable–as if Disney World decided to bulldoze Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride or something. (Er, waitaminnit–it did that. In 1998.)

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Google+ App Hits the iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 19, 2011 at 10:50 am

Google+ had an Android app from day one, but the iPhone version was temporarily stuck in Apple approval limbo. Now it’s on the App Store. (I haven’t tried it yet, but am looking forward to it–I’m not that crazy about the mobile browser-based version of the service.)

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Android Uncertainty: Apple Wins a Round Against HTC

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 16, 2011 at 9:04 am

On Friday, Apple won a round in its court battle against Taiwanese phone maker HTC, when an International Trade Commission judge ruled that HTC’s Android handsets violate two Apple patents. HTC is appealing the judgement.

My two favorite tech/law bloggers are FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller and This is My Next’s Nilay Patel. Mueller thinks this court decision could be a big deal:

I have looked at those patents before and they appear to be very fundamental. They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android. It’s telling that those two patents are also at issue between Apple and Motorola (and the ‘263 patent was also used by Apple against Nokia). A while after Apple started suing HTC, Motorola filed a declaratory judgment action against a dozen Apple patents including those two. Apple then counterclaimed by asking the court to determine that those patents are valid and infringed by Motorola. So the relevance of this goes way beyond HTC!

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