l-dopa

Google Pack; a good idea which right now consists of a half-baked selection of Windows software. Instead of Norton AntiVirus, why not ClamAV? Intead of RealPlayer, why not VLC? And where’d Open Office 2 go? And what about including a GMail-optimized version of Thunderbird? These are open-source projects that could really benefit from the publicity Google could provide.

And why not throw in Adobe Flash 8* plug-in too? FLA is the video format that Google Video is based on, it would be nice to be able to pre-suppose the nice new codecs in version 8.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of bundling together best-of-breed third-party software to pretty much knock the legs right out from under Microsoft — it’s far easier to tell your mom to download “google pack” than to download seven or eight various apps** — and the auto-update feature is very cool — but I wish this set of apps didn’t have the vague scent of “marketing synergy” about it.

~jeff

* geez, that feels weird to say.
** …but then again, my mom has a mac; and every time she sends me an email with a jpeg picture of the family dog nicely resized to 640×480 and correctly attached, I whisper a quiet prayer of thanks to the developers of iPhoto.