Firefox

A look at Google's acquistion and implementation of AJAX-based services.

The last few months have been portentuous ones. The U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could radically alter the landscape of the Internet. Microsoft has been becalmed by further delays in the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, and while it is moving decisively into the realm of network-available applications and services, there is a growing sense that the company is vulnerable. Meanwhile, Google has begun to assemble and make available the pieces of what is expected to become Google Office, mainly by acquiring and then refining AJAX-based products such as Writely. it is already clear that users who don’t require the complexity of an office productivity suite like Office — and that would be most of us — are going to benefit substantially from the eventual emergence of Google Office as well as other AJAX and Java-based productivity applications (because choice is presumably a good thing, and because the use of other competitor products and services will galvanize Microsoft and its developers), but the catalyst for change on a larger scale may be GDrive, the long-rumored Google service that will provide unlimited network storage to registered users and test the notion that the locus of personal computing is gravitating decidedly toward network-based services.

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