This year on September, Google turned 27 years since it officially started operating. My recollection of interaction with computers and the world wide web, take me to remember Disc Operating System- DOS, and Google, which seemed to be the door into the world wide web because you see, at that time the concept of the web is that there was lots of fun things, but to get to them, one had to initiatially search for them through Google. That meant that, if you knew how to type the URL www.google.com, you were fairly tech savvy enough. Ofcourse the more savvy folks would go to Yahoo to open their email to see who had sent them mail. Spam was rife and the so called Nigerian scam emails would always find their way to inboxes. Soon, we saw the introduction of Gmail. This was such a revolutionary way of doing email. The interface was so much more intuitive, and it had a fall back html version that would load in case your bandwidth was low. The revolution continued with the introduction of Google talk, which really didn’t pick up so much here in Uganda because most people had their instant messaging contacts on Yahoo messenger. The scenario would then be that you have your emails in Gmail, then you go to Yahoo to chat on messenger. We even had messenger dates, where you would go to an internet Cafe just to chat on messenger. You see, by that time browsing the web on the internet was a laborious task.
As a technology platform that has shaped the way millions interact with the web, it was then counter intuitive that Googles attempt at social media was a failure that was later buried. Google plus entered into the social media arena after the Facebook posed a steep challenge to the search giant. At a point it became that users would get on to Google just to search for Facebook.
This is akin to when Google launched the Chrome browser which was the death of the Internet Explorer browser. Their browser caught the attention of tech enthusiasts until it got to a point where many techies joke that whenever someone opens up a new laptop, they open Internet Explorer for one reason; to download Google Chrome.
One really transformative solution
Aaah, I won’t forget Google maps which together with Google earth would proverbial put the earth to fit into a computer. The thing about Google earth and a number of Ugandan users in its mobile version is that many would assume they knew how to work it. So, it there is a saying that if you want to get lost, completely trust a Google map. This is because the people that volunteer to register places on Google maps do it incompetent which then misleads users that want to enjoy the convenience of technology.
Google has since continued to blaze trails in the field of driverless cars. Now this is awesome, well, that is if you are not skeptical about technology that seems to have a mind of its own. You see, this is a product of un
Leave a Reply