Category: Google

Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast, writing on the Google Chrome blog:

Over the last few days, there’s been some confusion about the future of Chrome OS and Chromebooks based on speculation that Chrome OS will be folded into Android. While we’ve been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there’s no plan to phase out Chrome OS.

Notice the dancing around in that paragraph. Either the WSJ got it wrong, over-stating the work to “bring together” the two OSes, or this is happening, and somehow “Chrome OS” will stick around.

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Either that WSJ report is wrong, or Google is scrambling to keep the cat in the bag and not have its PC OS die too soon.

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Google currently ships two OSes. Android, which powers everything from watches to smartphones to tablets and ChromeOS, which is designed to run on small, (mostly) affordable notebooks.

According to Alistair Barr at The Wall Street Journal, that may be about to change:

Google engineers have been working for roughly two years to combine the operating systems and have made progress recently, two of the people said. The company plans to unveil its new, single operating system in 2017, but expects to show off an early version next year, one of the people said.

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This morning, Google rolled out their new logo. The new look is flat and crisp, but still retains the colorful look we’ve come to expect from the company. This lengthy blog post goes into the choices behind the redesign, and is a fun look at how you go about reworking one of the most-viewed logos on the planet.

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Larry Page:

What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related.

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Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos:

Google Photos gives you a single, private place to keep a lifetime of memories, and access them from any device. They’re automatically backed up and synced, so you can have peace of mind that your photos are safe, available across all your devices.

And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it. With Google Photos, you can now backup and store unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution.

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New from Google: a pay-for-what-you-use, invite-only, Nexus 6-only cellular plan that stiches together service from Sprint, T-Mobile and a Wi-Fi networks.

I can’t think of anything more Google-like.

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Eunice Kim, Product Manager for Google Play:

Several months ago, we began reviewing apps before they are published on Google Play to better protect the community and improve the app catalog. This new process involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle. We value the rapid innovation and iteration that is unique to Google Play, and will continue to help developers get their products to market within a matter of hours after submission, rather than days or weeks. In fact, there has been no noticeable change for developers during the rollout.

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Pebble:

‘Tis the season for anticipation. We count down the days to gifts and good wishes, and we just can’t wait. We’ve been in the workshop ourselves, crafting something Android Pebblers will love unwrapping. Version 2.3 of our Android app gives Pebble the power to reply and act on notifications right from your watch. It’s Android Wear notification compatibility on Pebble, and it’s awesome.

Android users on our own team are super thrilled with what version 2.3 lets them do from their Pebbles. We’ve built actions that even Android Wear devices themselves don’t perform.

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Sure seems like these Android Wear devices were rushed to market.

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Dieter Bohn:

“It is a sufficiently advanced form of paper as to be indistinguishable from magic.”

Matias Duarte, vice president of design at Google, is telling me about the central principle of Material Design. It’s the unifying metaphor behind Google’s new design direction, providing a unified set of physics and rules for how software should look and act. It’s also a little weird.

As interesting as this interview is, I find the whole “we have this amazing philosophy driving our entire design language” thing that software companies are doing more than a little tiring at this point.

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Mr. Kansas City, on Google:

Obviously, now that they’re my ISP, they will be able to garner more information about my house. Basically they now have visibility into anything we do online that’s not an encrypted transaction, such as the movies we stream from Netflix, the products we browse on Amazon, what songs we stream over Rdio, every website we visit, and who knows what else. It sounds creepy when you put it like that, but it’s also no different than any other ISP relationship I’ve had (AOL, Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T). It’s just that none of the others were in to Big Data as much as Google is.

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