After Google has a few billion dollars in the bank (or even just a few hundred million!), what should they do with it? Their business involves four things:
- knowing about everything interesting on the web
- knowing a lot about people who look at text ads
- intelligently putting text ads in front of people
- being friendly and easy to use
The second item is pretty interesting. Right now, they glean most of that from the search you just made as well as previous searches that you have made.
How could they know much more about you? One way would be to run your computer for you and look at the contents of your hard drive and your habits. Many folks would find that scary, but many would be fine with it as long as they didn't mess anything up. But adding spyware to Windows is messy, error-prone, and likely to cause the Windows to become even less stable than it already is. That's where the fourth item comes in.
The folks at Google know FreeBSD inside out. They could create a FreeBSD distribution to replace Windows. It would consist of the kernel, one of the window managers, and a small number of the obvious applications (web, email, word processing, presentations, music). They might choose a GUI that resembles the Windows look-and-feel to make it more learnable by current Windows users, they might choose one that is actually easier to use for low-end users (who will be the ones who will most likely want this).
The cost of putting the first version of the distribution together could be under a million dollars. The benefit to Google will be huge. They might not even use it for probing your interests unless you said it was OK. Maybe you can only get free tech support if you let it probe. People love Google, and would trust them with the information as long as Google continues not to do anything evil or hard-to-use.
Dell and HP might balk at pre-loading GoogleOS, but a zillion lower-end manufacturers would probably love to. Google could easily under-price Lindows simply by giving it away for free. Google could even get manufacturers to pre-load GoogleOS in a separate partition on Windows machines to let buyers choose which OS they want.
The information Google could glean just from registrations, much less from continuing use, could pay for the project. The good will they could sow would be huge. It would help the world by putting a simpler and more stable OS in the hands of users. The world would be a better place, and Google would have their name on it.
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