Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Google Health
The American medical system is a mess. If you ignore the inconsistent and expensive nature for a moment, there is still the nightmare that are medical records. Unless you go to the same doctor for the entirety of your life, you're bound to have fragmented pieces of your history spread across countless practices, specialties and even states. There exists no unified system and because of this, most doctors use proprietary software to manage their patients' information. The end result in rehashing your entire medical history every time you visit a new doctor and in extreme cases, injury or death result from a conflict due to an incomplete picture. As someone who isn't afraid to visit as a specialist when it's necessary, I know I loathe the idea of having to fill out pages upon pages about my health.
Google wants to change this with Google Health. Not yet realized as the one stop record shop they hope it will be, they're encouraging people to use it for various medical directives as a start. I suspect the tool doesn't get a ton of usage and they're promoting it in hopes more people will buy into it.
The question is, do we trust Google? People tend to be very sensitive about their medical histories so is hosting that information "in the cloud" something we're ready for? Is our information secure both from internal and external threats? Will an increased dependency on a hosted solution leave us in the dark in a time of peril? As the company aggregates more and more of our lives (email, calendars, docs, voice mail), are we in danger of one day waking up with a Google hangover?
Google wants to change this with Google Health. Not yet realized as the one stop record shop they hope it will be, they're encouraging people to use it for various medical directives as a start. I suspect the tool doesn't get a ton of usage and they're promoting it in hopes more people will buy into it.
The question is, do we trust Google? People tend to be very sensitive about their medical histories so is hosting that information "in the cloud" something we're ready for? Is our information secure both from internal and external threats? Will an increased dependency on a hosted solution leave us in the dark in a time of peril? As the company aggregates more and more of our lives (email, calendars, docs, voice mail), are we in danger of one day waking up with a Google hangover?
Friday, July 24, 2009
Google Chrome OS
Google recently announced their plans to release Chrome OS, an operating system that is built around the idea of running the Chrome web browser as the primary applications platform. No one has seen nary a peep of the software and yet it already has everyone talking about what it means to the likes of Microsoft. Touted as a new way to think about the OS, Google believes it will change how we think about netbooks and the things we use them for.
It's probably no great secret that I don't find the news at all surprising. I'd previously written that the Chrome web browser was more application engine than actual browser and the progression of the Chrome OS seems like the natural next step. In the purest sense, Google's vision of the future has us running all the programs we used to on our desktops via web applications hosted and delivered via the cloud (although that term is grossly overused). They built a browser to run the programs faster and now they're building an OS for that browser to run on. No bloat, no messy installations and everyone is using all those fancy web apps that Google has been spending all their time designing. Hmm.
Give it another 5 years and we'll all be talking about Google like we talk about Microsoft now. They really are changing the way we use our computers and like any great behemoth, we'll eventually cry monopoly all while begrudgingly using their products to become more efficient and effective at whatever it is we do. I, for one, welcome our new overlords.
It's probably no great secret that I don't find the news at all surprising. I'd previously written that the Chrome web browser was more application engine than actual browser and the progression of the Chrome OS seems like the natural next step. In the purest sense, Google's vision of the future has us running all the programs we used to on our desktops via web applications hosted and delivered via the cloud (although that term is grossly overused). They built a browser to run the programs faster and now they're building an OS for that browser to run on. No bloat, no messy installations and everyone is using all those fancy web apps that Google has been spending all their time designing. Hmm.
Give it another 5 years and we'll all be talking about Google like we talk about Microsoft now. They really are changing the way we use our computers and like any great behemoth, we'll eventually cry monopoly all while begrudgingly using their products to become more efficient and effective at whatever it is we do. I, for one, welcome our new overlords.