Push Notifications On The iPhone Are Great, But…

Posted by MG Siegler on July 12, 2009
From: techcrunch

After being scarce for the first couple of weeks following the new iPhone 3.0 software rolling out, apps with Push Notifications are now rolling out at a healthy clip. And that’s great, because the feature is really useful. To a point.

The issue I’m noticing now is that if you have too many apps with Push Notifications turned on, the whole system becomes a lot less useful. You see, Push Notifications are basically Apple’s way to get around allowing third-party apps to run in the background of the iPhone. So apps can now send these push messages to your phone to let you know if there’s some kind of message or update that you should open an app for. But if you have a lot of push messages coming in, I’m finding that you either have to pull out your phone every couple minutes, or risk still missing notifications that you probably want to see.

The problem is that the Push Notification message indicators are not built for heavy use. If you have multiple push messages coming in to you phone, only the latest one will be shown on the screen. And even when you unlock your phone, it’s hard to tell which push messages have come in. Though you can set a badge on app icons to let you know there is a message, if it was overridden by another message, you are forced to open the app to figure out what it was.

And let’s be clear: It’s not like I’m using Push on a ton of applications. I’m basically only using it (regularly) on three right now: Foursquare (a location-based social network [iTunes Link]), GPush (which does push for Gmail, which sadly isn’t approved in the App Store, yet), and Boxcar (which does Twitter @replies and DMs [iTunes Link]). At one point, I had it on for AIM too, but that got to be too much to handle in and of itself.

Between just those three, I’m getting pinged every few minutes during the regular hours of the day (if not more often during peak hours). And while that’s fine, because I can change things like the audio notifications, I want to be able to see a full list of what has come in since I last looked at my phone. Google’s Android platform handles this in a much nicer way, with a top drop-down menu that breaks up your notifications (which are also a bit different since applications can run in the background on Android). Of course, that is only after you unlock your phone, but still, that would be much more ideal than the current iPhone method.

But better would be some sort of way to break up these messages when you still have the phone locked. I’m thinking first of all maybe breaking up Push Notifications, text messages and calls by colors, and displaying them in a list on the screen. Then then having some way to further break down Push Notifications on that screen, maybe placing the app icon next to each and saying something like (4) new Foursquare messages, like Apple currently does for text messages.

This guy did a nice mock-up last year, but that was before Push Notifications were even available. And Apple has been thinking about this too, according to its patents. A system that is something like this (right) is needed even more now.

Naturally, this should all be user-adjustable in the settings, but it seems like an easy enough thing to do. Because as many people are shortly going to find out, the current way of handling Push Notifications just isn’t cutting it unless you’re only using one app that gets messages once every few hours. And with more Push-capable apps coming everyday, the problem is only going to get worse.

Microsoft's Office head talks Google and more

Posted by Ina Fried on 10 July

From: cnet

Stephen Elop is convinced that even in a world of free, browser-based productivity software, consumers and businesses will continue to pay for Office.

Microsoft will bow to reality with Office 2010, adding browser-based versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote. But, in an interview this week, the head of Microsoft's Business Division says that there is still plenty of life in the full version.

"At the highest level, what we're able to put forward to our customers is not just the best productivity experience, but one that spans the PC, the browser environment, the Web environment, services, and so forth, and the mobile device," Elop said. "So, it's the best productivity experience across the PC, the mobile phone, and the browser."

At its worldwide Partner Conference on Monday, Microsoft will give people a feel for how this works and is expected to start broader testing of the first piece--the desktop applications.

As for Google, Elop said that most businesses still think of Google as a search company or are just kicking the tires on Google Docs. He shrugged off the fact that Google this week brought the products out of beta.

"I've heard that the word was dropped," Elop said. "I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name."

He also said it is too soon to have an opinion on Google's just-announced Chrome OS.

"We haven't seen it," he said. "We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog."

In a wide-ranging interview, Elop shared more views on Google as well as his perspectives on Office, business software, and the broader economy.

What are customers asking for from Office? What's the most common thing that large businesses ask you for when you're talking to them about Office?
Elop: You know, when you boil it all down, everything we do essentially in the division, when you're with a CEO or a CIO or whatever the case may be, the base conversation is about productivity. It's about how can you help me solve this problem, and that problem often is about the productivity of some aspect of their business, of something they're trying to achieve competitively, or whatever.

Certainly in today's economic setting, cost savings comes into it. How can you help me save money in getting what we need to get done? How can you help me solve these problems, but do so in a more cost-effective way?

You mentioned cost savings. How is the business environment relative to investment in software and other technology compared to, say, when we spoke in February?
Elop: You know, when we spoke in February, I think there were a lot of people who didn't know what was going on.

I think people may not agree as to what's going on in the economy right now. Everyone has different opinions. But at this point people have opinions. And because people have opinions about what's going on in their business or their part of the economy, on that basis they begin to make plans. The plans will be different than the plans they might have had six or nine months ago, but they can actually establish a plan, and therefore a budget, and decide, OK, in our business we're going to do this, we're going to invest in these ways, and so forth. I don't want to say there's increased confidence as much as there is less ambiguity in people's minds. They've decided what it means to them.

Now, at Microsoft, you've heard Steve (Ballmer) talk a number of times about how we view what's happened as being a reset in the economy, that it's not a bounce back to the way things were, but things have reset, and things need to stabilize here even more, and then we'll see things begin to grow as increases in productivity in the economy kick in.

The product lineup that you guys are going to have going into next year, what does that add to your arsenal, particularly Office 2010?
Elop: I think at the highest level, what we're able to put forward to our customers is (not) just the best productivity experience, but one that spans the PC, the browser environment, the Web environment, services, and so forth, and the mobile device.

When people look at Office 2010 in the broadest sense, and that's both the client applications, it's the services offerings, it's the server products, it's the Web applications, all of those pieces together. Certainly what customers are recognizing as they've had pre-briefings and the early experimentation with the products is that we're at some form of generational shift into this world of software plus services, and Office 2010, I think, is surprising people as it relates to the extent to which we've fully embraced software plus services.

How do you see the balance of Web applications and desktop programs? You guys have obviously talked about it's not just about putting Office in the browser. What are the kinds of things that you think are best done via the browser, what are the things that are best done in a desktop program, and how does that inform sort of the way you guys have designed those two products?

Elop: First of all, it's helpful to look at specific scenarios. I'll just use a personal example. I was at my parents' home recently, I needed to edit a document, I hadn't carted my PC around with me. I had my father's PC connected to the Internet. I was able to use a Web application to quickly look at a document, make some lightweight changes, and pass that document along without interrupting the fidelity of the document, being a part of the collaborative experience with others at Microsoft. There's a specific scenario where the Web application played an important role.

imilarly, if you look in the mobile environment, there are scenarios related to, for example, taking a picture as part of some work that you're doing. You're unlikely to take a picture with a Web browser, or a notebook computer.

The second part of the answer, though, is that while there are specific scenarios that are best advantaged within each of the different ways of delivering our technology, the best experience comes from the combination of all of those things. So, we think less about the Web applications as standalone word processor things, and far more about it as a complement to the trio of the phone, the PC, and the browser environment. We think about the best experience being the sum of those things working well together.

Your preference, and certainly the way you guys are investing in the Web applications, is as an adjunct to the desktop, not a replacement. That said, how common do you think it will be that businesses license just the Web applications for at least a portion of their employees?
Elop: Well, we hope that it's very common to the extent that there are, let's say, workers in a business (where) today a company has said, look, there's one PC for 100 employees on a shop floor, or something like that. To the extent that they now license those workers for a lightweight browser experience in some way, shape, or form, and they're now part of the Office family, that's a positive thing for us. It brings them into the whole environment of productivity that we're trying to deliver.

So, those scenarios we think will be relatively common. It could be factory floor workers, it could be retail employees, and outlets around the world, and there are all sorts of scenarios that we think have been under-served from participating in the productivity experiences that some of these applications will serve to support.

I guess the other piece of that question is whether you expect that there will be a portion of customers that attempt to move some part of their workforce that has access to desktop Office to just browser-based versions?
Elop: I mean, by definition there will be some. Do I think it's a huge proportion? No, I don't. And the reason for that is because, particularly in that we're talking about the commercial setting, where we believe that the productivity experiences that we deliver in the rich client applications, with the Web applications as a complement to that, is still going to be a compelling experience that people are going to be saying, hey, I want people participating, for example, in collaborative editing of documents, in collaborative sharing of PowerPoint presentations, as examples.

For example, our multi-user authoring feature. There are examples like that which we believe represent improvements in productivity for these customers that are delivered through the rich client application. So while you'll always be able to point to some examples of someone somewhere making that decision, we don't believe that's going to be the dominating force.

How often do customers bring up Google apps in meetings, and is it usually when you're talking about the product, or when you're talking about price?
Elop: Customers are aware of Google in different ways. Sometimes just from a search perspective, sometimes they're aware of things like Google Docs and so forth. And our experience is it may lead to a discussion around what is software plus services, what is Microsoft's view on it. And the tendency is not, obviously in our conversation, to dwell on their price versus our price, or things like that, because it's two very, very different things.

When you put side by side, for example, the full range of on-premise and in the cloud services like Exchange, SharePoint, (Office Communications Server), and so forth, the full range of rich client applications and soon Web applications and so forth, combined with many years of enterprise support, of an understanding of how we're going to take care of mission-critical capabilities, it's a whole different conversation. And so that's why in the context of a large-scale customer who is engaging these things I think there's tire kicking, or they may look at these things, but there's a clear understanding that... enterprises have some very specific and far-reaching requirements that Microsoft over many years has figured out how to deliver.

Well, they're out of beta now, is that a significant move?
Elop: I don't know. I've heard that the word was dropped, I didn't notice that anything else had changed. So I don't know if the software suddenly got better, or they just changed the name. I couldn't interpret what it meant.

As someone who has been in this industry a long time, what do you make of Google's announcement that they're moving into the operating system realm with Chrome OS?
Elop: Well, let me just challenge the premise of your question. They've announced a couple of times now that they're moving into the operating system business, because there's the whole Android thing, and now there's Chrome.

We haven't seen it. We don't know anything other than what has been written in a blog. So it's very hard for us to know, without seeing what they're doing, to comment on it.

You have architected part of Office 2010 to run in the browser-based Office Web apps. If I'm not mistaken Chrome isn't one of the supported browsers, but it might, in fact, work in Chrome. Do you guys see Chrome as an important browser to develop for?

Elop: It depends on how you define important. From a market share perspective Chrome is very low. So I think we're driven by customers on these things. There are other browsers that have greater market share, and that's where we've concentrated our first efforts.

Shuttle launch delayed to assess lightning strikes

Posted by William Harwood on July 11, 2009
From: cnet

Already a month behind schedule, launch of the shuttle Endeavour on a 16-day space station assembly mission was delayed at least 24 hours, from Saturday to Sunday, to give engineers time to evaluate the effects of multiple lightning strikes at the launch pad during a severe thunderstorm Friday.

Eleven lightning strikes were recorded within 1,800 feet of the launch pad 39A, and while the shuttle is protected from lightning-induced electrical surges, NASA managers decided more time was needed to make sure no critical systems were affected.

"We've seen nothing so far that indicates anything was actually affected by the lightning strikes," said Mike Moses, director of shuttle launch integration at the Kennedy Space Center. "So I fully expect this to be a positive story, but we have a lot of equipment that has to be checked and that's what takes time."

Assuming no problems are found -- and assuming predicted afternoon thunderstorms cause no additional trouble -- NASA will reset Endeavour's countdown for a launch Sunday at 7:13:55 p.m. EDT. Forecasters are predicting a 70 percent chance of acceptable weather.

Friday afternoon, however, severe storms rumbled across the space center bringing torrential rain and electrical activity. "It was snap, crackle, and pop out there," one official said.

"If you were here in town yesterday, you saw a pretty spectacular electrical storm here at the Cape yesterday afternoon," Moses said. "We have several different systems out there monitoring lightning and we have a bunch of different rules and regulations and guidelines. But the bottom line is, we took 11 strikes within the point-three nautical miles (1,800 feet) of the pad."

The fixed gantry at the pad features a huge lightning mast that is connected to the ground by a catenary wire system anchored on the north and south sides of the complex. Seven of the 11 strikes hit the wires and two of those were above the threshold that requires additional analyses.

"We don't have any attached strikes to the orbiter itself, to the external tank, to the SRBs (boosters)," Moses said. "But we do know from our camera system that we took strikes on the lightning mast, the water tower, the wires themselves. So there were seven different events.

"With a lightning event, you have the initial spike of electricity that you are worried about, but then you also have a very fast-moving electrical field, which causes a magnetic field that can induce voltage on circuits that aren't even connected to it."

Two of the lightning strikes Friday resulted in 110-volt surges in the shuttle's electrical systems, just enough to qualify the strikes as official "lightning events."

"Strikes that close to the pad kick off extensive data analysis to make sure there are no problems," Moses said. "We have a panel, called the E3 panel, the electromagnetic effects panel, they take a look and decide if that strength of strike was big enough to then cause concern for the integrated stack, the orbiter, the ET, the SRBs. And if it was, then our engineering review panel will then go off, gather more data, and determine if a re-test is required."

By early today, engineers had determined Endeavour's external tank was in good shape, as were the shuttle's main engines and associated ground systems. The shuttle's payload also appears unharmed, although additional checks are planned.

The additional day was required primarily to make sure the shuttle's sensitive electronics were undamaged, along with the critical pyrotechnic systems needed to safely operate the ship's twin solid-fuel boosters.

"Those two areas decided they did need a little more retest to make sure that their systems are good," Moses said. "Part of the problem is, that retest can take different forms. If you think about it, on the SRBs, one of the things we're worried about are the pyro systems to separate the SRBs away from the external tank. Well, you can't really go check that system and turn it on because you don't want to go fire off those pyros.

"So we have various levels of tests we can do on some circuitry, but you've really got to make sure you're really checking what you need to check. So the teams were pretty confident we have enough data on other buses (circuits) to know that that (pyro) circuitry was OK, but we weren't quite there this morning."

How Much Does Google Like Twitter?

Posted by MG Siegler on July 11, 2009
From: techcrunch

That’s 44 accounts by my count. Where are all those Jaiku accounts?

Still think they have no interest in the micro-messaging service? Of course they do. It just may cost them more than a billion dollars to satisfy their fixation. And Microsoft is starting to get a fixation too. Remember when the two had a bidding war over a stake in Facebook?

Update: Interesting. As Habib points out in the comments, it looks like Google may have missed one of its own accounts in the region list: Google Arabia. That makes 45.

Microsoft aims for Silverlight at end of the tunnel

Posted by Ina Fried on July 10, 2009
From: cnet

By next year, half of all devices connected to the Internet will have Silverlight, says Microsoft's Walid Abu-Hadba.

That will still be just a fraction of the number of phones and computers that have a version of Adobe's Flash, but Abu-Hadba said that it will be enough to really start changing the mindset of those who create content for the Web.

"It's a totally different game," said, Abu-Hadba, who leads Microsoft's developer and platform evangelism efforts. Abu-Hadba noted that Microsoft now has a set of features that can appeal to both those streaming large-scale Web video content, as well as software developers aiming to create programs that run inside of businesses.

His comments came following Microsoft's launch Friday of Silverlight 3, the latest version of its technology for rich media applications. The new version allows for programs that work in and out of the browser, supports up to 1080p streaming, and lets users pause and rewind a live video stream.

One of the areas where Microsoft still has work to do is on the phone side. Microsoft has long talked about offering Silverlight on phones, even hoping to bring it to Apple's iPhone, but today it is not commercially available for any phone.

"It's taken a little bit longer than we would have wanted, absolutely," said Abu-Hadba.

However, Abu-Hadba and fellow developer unit executive Scott Guthrie say that Microsoft has also taken the approach that it wants the Silverlight experience on the phone to match that offered on the PC, as opposed to having different versions as Adobe does with Flash. Also, Guthrie said, the landscape for the phone has changed dramatically, with more phones adding the kind of graphics chips necessary to do hardware-based acceleration.

"We want to make sure people have a 'wow' experience," Guthrie said.

Microsoft is beta testing its phone software for both Android and Windows Mobile and announcements are expected at this fall's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.

"You are going to hear a lot more details about it later this year," Guthrie said. (For more on Guthrie's take on Silverlight 3, check out the video embedded below.)

For his part, Abu-Hadba said he doesn't wonder if Silverlight will be around 10 years from now, but rather whether his rival will. He said that Adobe has committed itself to moving from a design-oriented company to one that aims to offer a general purpose Web platform, something he said the company doesn't have the resources or experiences to make happen.

"I don't believe they have the assets or the organizational structure," he said. "That's what we do for a living at Microsoft."

Abu-Hadba said Adobe would be better off picking a specialty and sticking to it.

"I don't think they will exist in 10 years in the form they are today," he said. It's a bold statement, he agreed, but added how unthinkable it would have been to predict in 2000 that Sun Microsystems would go away.

TuneIn: A Media Dashboard For Your Twitter Stream

Posted by Jason Kincaid on July 10, 2009
From: techcrunch.com

Twitter has quickly turned into one of the best places to discover new media — be it video, images, or links — as soon as it comes out. Videos that may take hours or even days to surface on sites like Digg can virally spread across Twitter in a fraction of the time. As Fred Wilson put it, the value of Twitter lies in “the power of passed links”.

TuneIn, a new startup presenting today at today’s RealTime CrunchUp, is looking to harness this media and present it in an easily searchable, consumable format.

Using the site should be pretty straightforward for anyone who has used the main Twitter web interface. You’ll see your normal Twitter feed in the center of the page, but on the right side you’ll also see a list of the latest article links, videos, and photos that your Twitter friends have shared. You can choose to sort these shared links by popularity (the more Tweets a link gets, the more popular it becomes) or simply by time. And if you’d prefer to see media shared by only a select group of the people you follow, you can break Twitter users into groups (called Channels).

If you’d like to browse only media and ignore other tweets entirely, you can do that too by hitting the ‘media’ tab on the left hand side of the page. Content is filtered into three columns: ‘articles’, ‘video’, and ‘images’, or you can arrange everything into a handy grid with thumbnails of each item.

TuneIn isn’t the first startup to do this kind of media aggregation: Tweetmeme has been using Twitter to surface hot articles, images, and video for quite a while.

Chrome OS for the clueless: What it means for real people

Posted by Rafe Needleman on July 9, 2009
From: CNN

Late Tuesday night, Google, the company that became a tech giant through search and advertising company, announced that it's branching out into an unrelated direction, the operating system business. It will release next year the Chrome OS, a free competitor to Microsoft's Windows operating system. It will be targeted at Netbooks, a class of small, inexpensive computers, although eventually it will make its way to full-powered notebooks and desktop computers. It will be designed for accessing Web applications (like Google's own GMail and Google Docs), and it will take a lot of design and technology cues, as well as its name, from Google's browser, Chrome.

What does this mean to people who are thinking about buying a new computer now, or next year? Is the Chrome OS something to get excited about, or even wait for?

We won't know for sure what the operating system looks like until it comes out, which answers the second question handily: do not wait. If you need a new computer now, spend the money and get the use out of the machine while Google figures out how and when to get the Chrome OS out the door.

But to the other question: yes, this is very interesting, and potentially could cause some transformations in the computer industry, although they may be more subtle than Google--and Microsoft's detractors--hope.

Who cares about operating systems?

Computers need operating systems. Even computers that do nothing but run Web browsers need one. An Application like a Web browser--Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome--needs to run on top of a platform that gives it access to the hardware resources of the computer (the memory, the persistent storage, access to the networking and communications hardware, the screen, the keyboard, and so on); to peripherals plugged into a computer (printers, cameras that connect, memory cards); to the other software on the the computer (like the system for storing files); and lastly, to you, the user.

Or do they? What if you combined the operating system's functions with a browser's functions, which include accessing and displaying Web pages, keeping track of bookmarks and passwords, and connecting to computer-attached resources like Webcams?

Google is answering that question with Chrome OS. Google is saying, with this product, that the modern computer user spends so much time working with Web-based resources that the main control system for the computer should be the browser, not the operating system. Furthermore, Google sources tell us that the Chrome OS experience will bear little resemblance to existing way that users interact with their computer's main control program. A person familiar with the Chrome OS project told us, "All existing operating systems predate the Web, and the user interfaces are stuck in a desktop metaphor." The Chrome OS, we're led to believe, will be very different.

How? We don't know. It's a safe bet that the Chrome OS will lean more heavily on so-called "cloud storage" products--like Google's own productivity suites, Google Docs--that let users store their data and documents not on their computers but rather on the systems of the Web apps they are running. The great thing about cloud storage is that it's untethered to any individual user's computer. Log in to your Google Docs account from anywhere, and there's your whole workspace, right in front of you. It's liberating.

Google may also take a cue from its own e-mail application, GMail, which blends the traditional idea of having folders for e-mail with the concept of "labels." In GMail, you can drag messages into folders to file them, or you can drag folders (or labels) over messages to categorize them. It's the same thing, but the hierarchy people are used to in operating systems, where a file is in one folder at a time, and the folder may be nested in another folder, is simply not there. Folders and labels are interchangable and far more fluid.

But in Windows 7, Microsoft's next operating system, Folders are also less rigid than they've been in previous versions of Windows.

We can also expect that the Chrome OS will borrow user interface elements from Chrome the browser--like a tabbed metaphor for switching between "apps," and the mind-reading command line (address bar in the browser). It may also evidence Google's traditional obsession with clean (if not necessarily attractive) design and speed. The Chrome OS should be fast.

A ruse by any name

But under the hood, the Chrome OS will still be a traditional operating system. It will be an adaptation of Linux, a free operating system lovingly maintained, in various versions, by a global community of programmers. The Chrome OS will likely borrow the gritty bits of the operating system, the parts that connect to the computer's CPU, the memory, and other hardware. Google's most visible contribution, in addition to the human resources it puts on the project of working at the core of the operating system, will be in the user interface and how the OS handles user data and files.

Will users buy it? They haven't so far. The first Netbooks came with Linux-based operating systems, and users shunned them (or more specially, returned them to their points of purchase) in favor of computers running yesterday's version of Microsoft Windows, XP. Even though XP adds cost to a computer due to the high licensing fee that the manufacturers have to pass on to consumers, those consumers voted to pay the extra money for the familiarity of Windows.

The Chrome OS could well be better than any of the Linux variants that have come before it. It will certainly be cheap--Google says it will be free to manufacturers. Google also says it will be safer, thanks to technologies like "sandboxing" from the Chrome browser that prevent one app from infecting or stealing data from another.

But no matter how much better the Chrome OS is than Windows, users are still accustomed to Windows, and the first target market for Chrome OS, the Netbook category, presents special challenges. First, it's a small market, and second, many Netbook buyers get the machines as secondary, portable computers. They already have a larger laptop or desktop and they want a mini-size, portable accessory to go with it. For those users, a radically different operating system is a stumbling block, no matter how good it is by itself.

The stakes are big enough that it's worth the shot for Google. Google makes money through targeted advertising. The more they know about what you do, the better the ads you get will perform. If Google knows what you do at the operating system level, they can deliver you more specific advertising content. Also, a Google OS would likely lead people to Google services--and not Microsoft's or Yahoo's. Also, this is a long-term game. Google doesn't need to knock Microsoft off its peg tomorrow, or next year. But over time, the company may be able to chip away at Microsoft's pre-eminence as the leading operating system vendor, or at the very least force Microsoft to make its own operating systems more Web-friendly, which benefits the most popular Web service provider there is: Google.

Google needs to start spreading the word on the Chrome OS now, and not a year from now when the product comes out, to get developers and computer manufacturers excited about the platform, and working on compatible products. That takes time. It's also an area where Microsoft has an excellent track record; the Windows company spends a ton of money and energy on developer relations.

The most likely short-term impact the Chrome OS will have on the Netbook market is that it may encourage Microsoft to drop its prices on the Windows 7 licenses it sells to manufacturers. But until developers start writing major software for the operating system (games, photo editors, and major productivity suites like Office), it's very unlikely that Google will have much of an impact on Windows sales.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that Microsoft is hardly standing still. Its new Bing search engine is actually quite good in comparison to Google's most popular product, Google Search, and the upcoming version of Microsoft Office will have Web capabilities that put it in competition with Google's online word processor and spreadsheet.

A year from now, there will likely be Google Chrome OS Netbooks (and possibly larger laptops) available for sale alongside Windows-powered models. Will people like me recommend them? Maybe, for some users, in particular those on tight budgets and those with no or only limited knowledge of Windows or Apple's OS.

Building an operating system is a major project, but it's only part of the job. Even if the Google OS is fantastic, it will need to steal customers accustomed to using Microsoft and Apple devices. And even if those customers want to be convinced that Google's product is better, they may find it very difficult to make the switch.