CrankyRants.com

Long ago on a misty island nestled far away in the rough and merciless sea roamed a vast network of enormous and viscous dinosaurs known as Microsaurus Rex. Nothing got in their way. They ate what they wanted. They trampled what they didn’t. Life was good.

You know where this is going, of course. Like the faint and unconvincing acting of Jack Black had us believing that the entire crew was shocked and horrified to find something more frightening than the band of T-Rex, so have the executives in Redmond come to a single and inevitable conclusion. Google Kong can kick our ass.

With the news this morning that Microsoft has tendered a $44.6 billion dollar offer to buy Yahoo, the network is ablaze with questions. What will it mean for the consumer? What will happen to MSN? Seems low, will someone else step in? What happens to AT&T now that it’s got the Mac guy offering to split a dime bag with him while the Windows guy wants to do his taxes?

Microsoft is clearly concerned and has been for some time. This deal has been in the works for well over a year, and it goes a long way to keeping them in step with Google’s Android announcement. Many have been predicting for months that the battle would eventually move off of the computer screens and onto our phones.

Yahoo’s very friendly relationship with SBC/AT&T only strengthens the belief that this deal is an attempt to dig even deeper into the mobile user base as Google readies a brigade of sharpened shovels. Extend the thought process even further and it would not be surprising to see a Microsoft buyout of another Yahoo / AT&T bedfellow, Tivo.

Honestly, though, it’s hard to imagine that combining Yahoo with Microsoft with AT&T can be considered a truly formidable foe to the massive and muscular ape that is Google. Hell, AT&T is still struggling with the SBC merger long after it was completed.

Long-term, however, it will without a doubt lead the way to more affordable or free services for the fleeing victims caught in the middle. For anyone who enjoys the free benefits of the Google Maps vs. Microsoft Maps battle, there will almost certainly be more of that to come as the battling beasts claw at each other for the right to consume we who are the tiny scrambling snacks with bank accounts.

Okay, I get it. I understand. Google only wants content that helps their users find something of value. And Google doesn’t want you to make any money off of it. That money belongs to them dammit. I get that now.

After getting slapped like an alter-boy with last quarter’s Google PR dance, I took a different approach than most. I quit. What’s the point of maintaining a site if it will be systematically judged as valuable or not based soley on an unknown formula.

Google judged that I advertised on my blog in a way they didn’t like or that the articles were not up to their standards or something, and struck it from their white list. So I threw my hands up in the air and went on to other projects. Instead of listening to everyone who maintained that pagerank only means something to people trying to sell things, I caved.

Well, they’re right. If Google views a site like Engadget, one of the most prominent tech aggregators and opinionators as “unimportant” and dings their “PR” accordingly… that’s a clear sign that the system is broken. So time to do what I tell my kids all of the time. Just ignore them.

I even met some of the guys from Google at SES Chicago recently and had a lot of my questions answered in a very friendly way. No evilosity at all. Which makes the whole situation even stranger. Clearly one person or one line of code somewhere saw something unlikeable in the archives of this site and placed a frowny-face next to the domain. Fair enough. Would be nice to know what it was, but never mind. Just ignore them.

Back to writing then, Google be damned. I don’t need sponsors. I don’t need ads. I might need medication. I’ll likely need counseling. But I certainly don’t need some algorithm to determine for me what is and is not worthy content. If anyone enjoys the posts, let me know and pass them around. I’ll get along fine without Google. Bastards.

P.S. Apple… you’re next on the list. Don’t think I’ve been asleep during your whole “We Sold 4 million iPhones and cured Herpes” speech.
 

Nothing beats watching two giant space Krackens go toe-to-toe in a battle for the galaxy. And now we get to watch it happen live as Google fixes it’s single eye, rimmed in fire, on the Blue Towers of Microsoft with their newest subscription-based Office suite.

Google has been offering a free version of its online software suite called Google Apps for the past six months. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities nationwide are using the free service, Google said.

The fee-based version, Google Apps Premier Edition, includes five times more e-mail storage — 10 gigabytes per e-mail box — as well as a guarantee that all services will be available 99.9 percent of the time with around-the-clock technical support.

Google also is adding mobile access to e-mail accounts through the BlackBerry devices that tether workers to their offices.

So what happens when two of the largest software companies known to mankind fail at winning the entire market and can’t buy the other out like they’re used to doing? Temporarily cheap or free software may be in the works! That always seems to be the next logical step.

Shortly after purchasing the garage where the seeds of what would become Google were sown, a new series of Google products was announced to take advantage of the press created around the now famous car port.

The first new service is Google: Car Port. Through a series of massive server clusters, Google plans to spawn a global database of all vehicles currently being stored within personal and public parking garage as an overlay to Google Earth. With the push of a button, any user can see push pins and detailed information for every car, bike, moped, or 3-wheeled Euro-cart in the known populated regions. Before a vehicle will show up, owners must first sign up for a Google: Car Port account, which will be handed out in limited number and require Google Ads to be placed on the vehicles in a rotational manner.

In addition, plans are in place for Google: Oil Spill Relational Imaging, a service by which garage owners can photograph and post images of the oil stains left from poorly maintained vehicles. The images will then be run through high-end image processing through a series of massive server clusters to flag any likenesses to famous celebrities and religious icons. Any matches will immediately place the oil stain up for purchase through Google Auctions.

Finally, Google will tie the entire theme together with Google: Unneeded crap That’s Too Sentimental to Pitch Cataloging Service. Using a series of massive server clusters, Google will allow users to compile an inventory of every worthless piece of junk currently being stored in the garage because their spouse or roommate won’t allow it in the house anymore but it’s too valuable or memory-filled to even consider throwing away. For an additional fee, Google will email fake item appraisals and offers to purchase for the express purpose of proving to the spouse or roommate that it is in fact… too valuable to throw away, yet too sentimental to sell.

Old news is good news for Google these days. They are planning to expand their online news index to include stories published years ago, continuing the Internet search leader’s recent efforts to create new sales channels for long-established media while it strives to make its own Web site even more useful.

The catch? Gotta pay to play of course. You’ll see excerpts from the old stories, but must signup with the source’s website to see the entire article. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and The Washington Post are among the sources that Google will index. And they’re thrilled about getting their archives indexed and for the countless referels that will come their way.

The agreement represents “a perfect example of how we can work with content providers to realize their business goals,” said Jim Gerber, Google’s content partnerships director.

So what other “partnerships” can we expect to see from the unstoppable force that is Google? No one’s put up an archive of personal medical records yet. That’d be nice. How about “Google Moments”, a complete listing of your personal schedule culled secretly from your outlook or Google Calendar. Not looking forward to their release of “Google Most Embarrassing Moments Caught on Film: Personal Edition”.

Look out Discreet. Google has it’s giant single eye, rimmed in fire, fixed squarely on the 3d market with Google Sketchup. Released a few months ago, and no 3dMax by any standard, there’s still plenty of low-level 3d packages out there they may take a face-plant because of Google’s free software giveaway. Would be cool if they integrate it with Google Earth to drop your house into the Google World, but I don’t think that’s their main goal here. Here’s what you get:

• Click on a shape and push or pull it to create your desired 3D geometry.  
• Experiment with color and texture directly on your model.
• Real-time shadow casting lets you see exactly where the sun falls as you model.
• Select from thousands of pre-drawn components to save time drawing.

Not much more than a toy at this point, but with their endless bucket of cash you can bet it will become much more over time. If I had any form of small software company at this point,  I’d be keeping an eye on the skies for 2 black helicopter’s now. One with a Microsoft Logo, the other with Google Eyes.

Google. Where to start? Those six letters mean so much to our Internet experience. Whenever someone needs to find something, the most common and popular search engine is Google. Its appeal comes from its simple design, great results, and catchy name. Not just is Google a great way to find almost every thing in the world, but also Google has been one of the most successful businesses of our decade. In mere months of going public, Google’s stock was worth over three hundred fifty dollars per share! With the release of Google Video, a new component of how we can search has been added. Not just Google Video is available, oh no, there are more Google options then words in this sentence! Google Images, Google, Catalogs, Google Earth, Google Finance, Google News, Google Labs, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Translate, Google Scholar, Google Everything! Google has become such a dominant online force, that almost every site uses some form of Google Adsense to make money for displaying Google advertisements. Without Google, what would we say instead of “just Google it”? Google has changed the way we look at surfing the web and will hopefully be on the leading edge of Internet technology.