the mofo with the info.

I read up on Google’s latest mind-boggling project, Google Secure Access, a free, secure wireless initiative, and prepared to get geekily excited about it until I found the increasingly common “(Windows XP and Windows 2000 only)” disclaimer. I thought back to the recent offerings from everyone’s favorite Mountainview mothership, and couldn’t help but think, “Why does Google hate me?” As a home Linux and Mac OS X user, I have gotten by pretty well lately, playing some cutting-edge games (ok, game), finding most new hardware to be OSX/Linux compatible, and using the commodity standard Microsoft Office platform; things were looking pretty good for a lowly Linux/BSD/OSX user such as myself. The systems were finally making inroads to the non-tech crowds, too: my technophobic brother was asking me serious questions about the Mac mini, and I hear you can get a free Linux box with the purchase of a qualifying rifle at Wal-Mart[1]. Just as it looked as if the Redmond beast might have to deal with some serious competition, opposition came from the unlikeliest of places: the company that Microsoft identifies as its biggest threat.

Though the first line on Google’s company overview page smugly declares that the company’s mission is to make information “universally accessible and useful”, a glance at Google Labs is enough to turn a *nix user green with compatibility envy. Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video Viewer, Google Talk, and now Google Secure Access are six projects recently released into beta or production through their lab, and all are currently only compatible with Windows systems. Though Google Talk uses open standards for the bland text chatting protocol, the real meat of the service is its VoIP client, which currently only lets you talk to other boring Windows users. Even Gmail, the nothing-short-of-revolutionary webmail client, went into public beta without Safari compatibility (though they are now Safari compatible, advanced features such as Rich Text formatting still only work in IE and firefox).

Google gets a lot of nerd-lurf because their famously stable architecture runs on Red Hat; a Google story on slashdot will invariably have more defenders than detractors in the comments section (in contrast to the roundly reviled Microsoft), but why should the mere mention of Google’s name still bring the warm fuzzies to the hearts of *nix the world round, when they’re not giving anything back to the community as a whole? As it stands, if either Google Talk or Google Secure Access becomes a big, well-established service, it will just be another single-platform unofficial community standard that makes it difficult to run an OS X/Linux desktop machine while the majority of the world runs Windows. In fact, at this point it looks as if Google Talk will supplant Skype, the de facto VoIP standard that currently provides full-featured clients for Windows, Linux and OS X. I picture a grim future two months from now, sitting in my local coffee shop, surrounded by Dell users securely connected to this wonderfully stable wi-fi service and talking to each other inanely while I sit in the corner with my PowerBook, beautiful, insecure, silent, and useless, like an electronic Anna Kournikova. In my imagination I’m also wearing black and smoking. Yeah.

Now, before you jump to conclusions, I’m not a total psycho, and I’m not going to do anything drastic, like stop using “to google” as a verb or to start using Yahoo! as a search engine. Google’s core services are still unmatched for reliability and simplicity of interface, and the company continues to innovate with amazing web technologies such as Google Maps, Google Images, and Google Local that benefit technology users everywhere. However, it does raise the inevitable question: is it economically unfeasible for a large technology company to make useful, quality, cutting-edge cross-platform software for the desktop?

Will Chiong is a Google user and a raving Mac fanatic. He currently works as an IT application developer for an investment bank. You can find his earlier publications easily… using Google Scholar.>