Last night, making my way with the amiable KTray to the NYC Chinatown restaurant Dim Sum Go Go to meet our mutual friend LP (KTray, I’m sure Jose readers will be looking for a review soon), I found I wasn’t sure where I was going or how long it might take to get there. This is a common side-effect of New York City living, but last night it was alleviated greatly with the help of one of the greatest companies of this, or any, century: Google. I simply reached for my excellent Motorola Q 9c, opened the Google Maps program I had previously downloaded and installed on my Q (for free, of course), turned on the (free) GPS function included in the Google Maps program, plugged in the address of the restaurant, and arrived at my destination in no time at all (sort of).

It made me so happy I cried. I love you, Google.

I’m not a complete fool. I know that no company could possibly be perfect. Anyone who has the brilliance to start, grow, and maintain such an undertaking must be off balance in some way, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin are certainly no exception. Read this fairly humorous site for more on that: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googlife. Nevertheless, compared to what other companies are up to in the world, Google does seem to be a kind of utopia for those geeky enough to land a job there, and the products they produce, as a whole, are infinitely more useful to the world than those of, say, Philip Morris.

Microsoft will never be able to topple Google. They are smarter than Bill Gates, they are leaner and more flexible, their products are far less bloated than Microsoft’s, and not nearly as interdependent upon one another as the products served up by Apple and that rotten liar, Steve Jobs. Even as I type, the Times has published and article outlining Google’s plan to offer smelly Yahoo their ad placement technology, which could potentially net Yahoo an extra BILLION dollars a year, effectively keeping them from making any deals with Microsoft, as well as pouring more dough into the coffers of Google. The deal would also most probably cement Yahoo’s position behind Google in the internet search game. You lose again, Bill and Jerry.

And so they should. Google understands the world in a way their competitors do not. This fundamental quality in their thinking makes them, for the time being, impossible to beat. I use gmail for my webmail client, and I have no complaints because it simply works and it works simply. I use Google for my search engine, and it is hands-down the most thorough and straightforward. Sure, there are paid ad placements, but they are easy enough to identify and avoid, and no where near as distracting as all the useless articles cluttering Yahoo’s undignified mess. Google Maps and Google World are ubiquitous for finding point B, my Google reader delivers all the latest blog nonsense my friends concoct, Google analytics tracks the health of my own site, Google docs helps out every person who can’t scrape up the $350 for a new copy of Microsoft Office. YouTube is owned by Google. They have a pretty damn good calendar program. There is photo editing, sharing, and organizing via Google’s Picasa software (which I recently downloaded and was delighted to find it was far more intuitive and less clunky than Adobe’s own Bridge software). And a hell of a lot more. And I can bring it all together with my iGoogle home page. Click here to see an amazing array of free stuff for you to do to make your life more interesting (as long as you own a computer).

And every single bit of it is free to anyone with an internet connection. That is fucking amazing. Google, you have my vote for president of the world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm and is filed under The Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.