With Yahoo! Search in the market and indexing integrated into new windows versions, Google decided to ditch Google desktop. Their announcement claims that people are more trusty of a cloud computing nowadays and keeping the desktop version is not necessary anymore. However this can not be the real reason. While cloud computing is becoming more present in everyday life, desktop is not going anywhere soon for at least 4 reasons:
- SATA drives are faster.
- ISPs all over the world are putting caps in their plans.
- I can’t think of any moneywise online solution to store my 300GB of data I accumulated over 20 years.
- A lot of people trust their local storage more than the cloud. Local storage is always available while cloud might not be sometimes.
I’m not saying it is not going to happen. I just don’t see it happening right now. So there must be something else behind their decision. The one I can think of is no viable monetizing solution of the product (could they access private data for advertising??).
Whatever the reason, this can not drastically change the way people manage their information (and Information Retrieval as a part of it). As mentioned, there are other solutions available.
However, I’m surprised Google is putting all their bets on cloud and nothing else. Wouldn’t it be better to combine cloud and desktop together (such us Ubuntu One for example)? On the other hand they are allowing to use their apps offline keeping local copy of information on the desktop! Am I the only one who sees the conflict here?
