NetGuido

After the office windows or customizable home page, Google announced that its widgets available on any website 20 years after the battle of operating systems between Microsoft and Apple, 10 years after that of browsers between Microsoft and Netscape, it is the turn of Google to ignite a new war of standards in computing, again against Microsoft or Yahoo, by announcing the availability of its “widgets” on any site and any blog.


The rise of the widget In English, Widget means “thing” but the word can also act as a contraction for “Windows Gadget ‘, a small piece of program designed to complement the Windows desktop or Mac OS computer, disseminating information from the ‘: schedules, weather information practices, games, etc… Integration by Apple in Mac OS X 10.4 within an application called Dashboard and announced in the future of Microsoft Windows Vista, widgets are also relevant actors of the Internet since turning the computer desktop into a real web portal. Yahoo has acquired Komfabulator for example, a widget while Google has benefited from the launch of its Desktop Search, a search engine on hard disk, to propose to turn dozens of embeds to its users. Towards a new war platforms A picture of the strategy Microsoft Windows Live, the border between online and offline and fades behind this issue widgets emerges in fact a real war of standards between players claiming the status of “platform” , That it is an OS, a browser or a customizable home page. Indeed, the widgets Yahoo, Google or Microsoft are not compatible with each other and each of these actors trying to attract developers to enrich its own environment. In this game, one of the most effective seems to have been Net Vibes, the pioneer of customizable home pages, created by the French Tariq krim. Thanks to its 5 million users and a very active policy vis-à-vis the developer, Net Vibes already claimed nearly 4600 modules, streams and other podcast on its own ecosystem (http://eco.netvibes.com/) while Google (http://www.google.com/ig/directory? synd=open) did announce that 1220 and that Microsoft (http://microsoftgadgets.com/Gallery/) ceiling for the moment to 394… Expand the hearing to attract developers It is within this context that the strategy of Google is interesting. After the desktop and customizable home page, Google has indeed announce that all of its widgets can now be resumed on a blog or website, thereby incorporating a track already explored by WidgetBox.com who hears ” widgets the Web. ” “By making Google Gadgets available to all, we want to connect developers with enthusiastic consumers more and make information accessible and useful to everyone,” said Adam Sah, Gadget Architect at Google. For now, this recovery is limited to a simple copy and paste code, but many analysts anticipate the arrival of Google Gadgets on the whole publishing tools Group: Blogger, Whitely even Ad Sense, a program particularly appreciated webmasters … Like Microsoft, which is working on porting its Gadgets blogs on Windows Live Spaces, time is therefore the balance of power between the major portals and no standard widgets has yet imposed. The company that will win this battle could therefore find themselves in a monopoly situation, comparable to that of a certain Microsoft in the market for operating systems. It remains to be seen whether this war widgets will not happen at the expense of interoperability of Internet applications, interoperability, however, to the success of this network.