Without a doubt, Google stole the spotlight with the announcement of its upcoming Chrome operating system late yesterday and sent everyone buzzing about the search giant’s very public swipe against Microsoft. But amid all the chatter on the Web, Stacey Higginbotham warned on GigaOM that we shouldn’t get too excited just yet since Google still has to tackle the gargantuan task of convincing carriers that selling netbooks with the OS is the way to go. Instead, the Chrome OS announcement signals the company is another step closer to creating an advertising operating system that “extends across all devices and all screens.“ Across the GigaOM Network at WebWorkerDaily, Simon Mackie had a hunch that Google would be making this move soon (read his post on GigaOM Pro; subscription required) and says it makes a lot of sense now that the majority of people’s computing activity happens on the web. Continue »

I woke up this morning to see the whole world talking about Google’s new operating system, Chrome OS, that is targeting  netbooks and desktops. I spent a big part of the morning reading many different stories and posts — and they say absolutely nothing, apart from chunks of information from the original blog post, which is, well, a lot of words that say nothing much. Meanwhile, The New York Times has the best overview of the Chrome OS announcement, so don’t bother reading anything else for now. The guys at jkOnTheRun sum up the release of the OS succinctly when they write:

A web, or cloud, OS that puts the bulk of all user activity firmly up in the web. No heavy lifting on the user’s netbook; that will all take place up in the cloud with the Chrome OS handling it all. This is so clever on Google’s part, and could very well turn the next page on cloud computing.

Stacey is currently working on our analysis, but I was hoping to get a conversation started with our community — what do you make of this new development? Do you think Google has what it takes to beat Microsoft, or will this prove to the the equivalent of a Hollywood starlet, hot today, not tomorrow?

It took a little over a year, but The day has finally come: Google is removing the beta label from the entire Google Apps suite of products today, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk. Google hopes today’s move will eradicate the stigma some companies have harbored towards using its Apps products, thus increasing the likelihood they will buy Apps subscriptions.

Google has been steadily innovating its Apps product since it first launched for business customers in February 2007, with more than 50 new features added to the Apps suite in 2009 alone, such as the ability to sync Apps with Microsoft Outlook. While large companies such as Genentech and Fairchild Semiconductor have signed up for Apps subscriptions, Google said others were deterred from doing so because of the beta label tied to the suite of products. Unlike Google Apps, the company’s Chrome browser left beta status in less than a year. Continue »

If you’re a startup that’s building its business using Google’s services, be warned, because the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant is a fair-weather friend. Take real estate listings companies like Trulia and RedFin, which both use Google Maps as part of their offerings. They got a rude awakening today, thanks to moves being made by Google’s Sydney office. Google’s Australian arm is looking to get into the classified real estate business via a new tool that uses Google Maps and connects buyers and renters to available properties. Continue »

Updated: Today we’ve received an email and seen multiple tweets alerting us to the fact that Google’s App Engine software development platform is down. We’ve emailed the company for details, but in the meantime, a check of the App Engine status page won’t even load at 11:30 a.m. PDT, and updates on the site indicate that it’s been put into unplanned maintainance mode after experiencing problems this morning.

Update: A Google spokeswoman tells us that the service was down because of a storage issue. She emailed a statement that read: “Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem and service has now been restored. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site.”

We’ve seen several complaints about the impersonal way Google seems to be handling this, criticism that certainly may cause the company harm in its quest to woo the enterprise to its platform. Readers, can Google keep App Engine flying?

Several marketing associations supported by Google have banded together and released seven principles that they believe should govern online privacy. Are you ready for a journey to the Emerald City? Because the principles are the online advertisers’ attempts to stave off government regulation around protecting consumers’ online privacy by diverting attention to the Great and Powerful Principles rather than the data scavenging that’s going on behind the curtain. Kind of like a certain self-aggrandizing wizard.

Given that Congress has been keen to see opt-in programs, and there’s no mention of that in these principles, my hope is that regulators won’t be taken in by this, and will still fight for better disclosure of advertising practices and an opt-in program. In the meantime, let’s pull back the curtain and check out what the wizards of marketing are telling us. Below are the marketing principles taken directly from the position paper — and in italics, what they really mean: Continue »