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A Google PC?

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piratePenguin:
There's speculation that Google will release a PC with their own operating system for doing multimedia stuff and web browsing. T'would be interesting.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-predict1jan01,0,3503327.story (there are other predictions concerning Google and 2006 in there).

I can't see Google doing this, but I'd like to see it. It's not cheap to enter the hardware/operating system market, but there are things they could do that noone else could (advertisements everywhere!, so it could be gratis).
A Google handheld would be nice, because they could have Google Maps (and could use it to implement GPS, although this can already be done by anyone using the API.), and then they could have easy access to Gmail and Google Talk and other Google stuff.

hm_murdock:
It would become a new way to sell things. Why actually sell products when you could give them away? And then, you can annoy people into not using them via the same ads that you require to turn a profit! Brilliant!

Cable and satellite TV proved that people will pay to be ad-free. Unfortunately, now cable channels, which get paid by the viewer to exist, run ads. It seems to be a corporate thing these days. You can't exist unless you do something to help out some other CEO.

piratePenguin:

--- Quote from: hm_murdock ---
Cable and satellite TV proved that people will pay to be ad-free.
--- End quote ---
I would've thought most people would be paying for the TV.
I know I wouldn't normally pay (at least not much) to be ad-free. I don't mind ads.

Calum:
i hate them, but only now that i can see channels where they are on all the damn time. most cable channels seem to have adverts for literally half the airtime. On the BBC channels, there are no adverts, and on ITV and channel 4, there are only adverts every quarter hour, and if the show is an hour long, you'll only get two advert breaks in it. Then WHAM! hundreds of american channels filled with adverts arrived on our screens.

anyway, they don't say much about this google OS, do they? do you think the PCs will be bog standard x86 type PCs? do you reckon they will be some linux or BSD type OS? possibly gnu/hurd? it's have to be based on some free thing to keep costs down i would have thought...

worker201:
Moving away from topic, I think that television's largest problem is not ads.  It's the futility of the star based system.  All 80+ channels get sent to your house, whether you watch them or not.  HBO gets sent to your house, even if you don't pay for it - it gets descrambled at the cable box on the side of your house.  Just blasting the receivers with as much crap as possible is not an efficient way to run anything.  I want "The Daily Show", "The Colbert Report", and "Law&Order" at my house, and would be willing to pay $5 or $10 per month for them.  But I have absolutely no interest in any of the other shows or channels.  So cable's main problem is their distribution method, not their programming or ad-based revenue system.  

I doubt that Google is brave enough to step beyond this sort of firehose model.  The question is, who will?  DuoMaxwell and I had an idea to offer this sort of service, but we don't have the money to make it run.  And the people who do have the money have no balls or ideas.

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