News Google to launch Google PC into Walmart

Sounded like a good idea till people mentioned googles mainstay business is advertising. Also they look to be moving into graphical ads, that deal with AOL, put the steps in motion.

PS. What is *nix.. ?

 

I think it refers to Unix of which there are several flavors. So under this title you would have pure Unix, Linux and BSD. But i could be very wrong

 

I would probably have said that Google's main business was taking things others had made needlessly complicated and returning them to a sort of simple, clean elegance without dropping the important elements in the process. (sure advertising may be the one they make the most money on so far)

I think there is definetely a market for a "google box" to go in your front room.

My family recently bought a PVR (Hard drive, digital terrestrial TV receiver and some menu's to tie it all together) It was a pretty cheap one at £100.

Thing is its still not the simplest bit of kit we've ever seen and its engineering/programming seems a little flawed - do things too quickly in menu's and it loses all signal and has to be turned off and booted up again.

So while off in the shops looking for bargains in the january sale we were looking for a better box with digital reception, PVR functions like recording and a DVD recorder as the latest ones have, to cut a long story short the cheapest one we saw was a £500 sony box .. It got me to thinking just how cheaply you could build a small PC with the same functions (if not exactly 100% as easy to use granted)

If google released a small box that could do that (granted would have to be tinkered with to fit a DVD-R ?) for what ~£130 .. Pretty sure we'd get one.

 

Coincidence Dept, I was looking at Amstrad's E3 earlier.

Part-funded by adverts, running on Linux, basic surf, email and videophone, dirt cheap... Perhaps Sir Alan "You're fired" Sugar has some new friends and a GOO4 in mind...

 

It still amazes me what a brand image can do for a company.

To this date, I still have absolutely no idea how Google manages to make so much money.

 

Then you've maybe not heard of:

Omnicom (2004 revenue $9.7bn)
WPP ($9.4bn)
Interpublic ($6.2bn)
Publicis Groupe ($4.8bn)
Dentsu ($2.9bn)
Havas ($1.9bn)
Aegis Group ($1.4bn)
Hakuhodo DY ($1.4bn)
Asatsu-DK ($473m)
Carlson Marketing Group ($347m)

All just from advertising.

 

I give you the 239 quid Humax - http://www.play.com/play247.asp?pa=sr&page=title&r=ELEC&title=748690

It doesnt have a DVD recorder, but it does have a USB2 socket and the ability to archive the recording off to a PC in plain old MPEG2 format. I'm sure you can work out what you would need to do after that

 

well, now this is an interesting turn up for the books.

for thoe who dont know, google have been making 'google boxes' for quite some time, you can buy your own little peice of google here: http://www.google-store.com/appliance/product_info.php?products_id=1

so, now google allready have guys who can quite happily make linux do backflips and have experience in building boxes that are production ready, they have the skills to take something as complex as *nix and simplify it using their typical google 'do what it says on the tin' approach to interfaces.....

soooo..... they target a home linux based pc at mom'n'pop who want to read emails, surf the intarweb, maybe even share photo's around and play music..... so, thats gmail (with google adverts in it allread), firefox with the google toolbar (free to provide and hey, what do you know, every website in the world has google adverts on them), picasso for the photo sharing.... and as for music.... im pretty sure google can come up with something.

oh, then for writing letters we have open office and thats a freebie.... and the OS is free and branding it is as simple as copy/paste (they allready have all the logo's and interfaces designed on previous google applications).

oh, and did i mention they allready make servers, and have dudes that can do this in the blink of an eye? (seriously, everything ive described can be done very simply on linux).

personally, i would stand up and applaud if google could 'work their magic' on linux. im a big linux fan, but i know its insanely complex, more so than it has to be. if google can do their thing and make it easy and accessable to the common man, then im all for that. and yes, im sure that somewhere google will be making a buck or two, but nobody would be doing this sort of thing if they werent. the reason im not mentioning or complaining about googles adverts are because i like them, and before you cry heresy, look at it this way.... i'd much rather have the plain static text of googles ads than those huge 6 inch square flashing flash crappy things that msn want to implant on your retina. although, i would fight till my last breath to stop someone putting adverts on my desktop.

 

anandtech search runs off one of these
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2523&p=2

 

Those are pretty cool, if I could afford it I'd get one just to play around with!

 

http://www.google-store.com/appliance/images/GO0144E.jpg

I dont think I'd like one of those RACK MOUNT SERVERS sitting underneath my monitor! And also, I think that would cost a tad more than $200

 

I'm not particularly interested in the software part. For $200 (or less), I'm curious how reuseable the box will be for something else.

 

If there really is a *nix running on it, then i'd can guess that putting another on there would be easy. And if not, i can't see it being long till a small distro is brought out to cope

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/04/google_denies_pc/