The Blog

So Google Buzz has come out. Unlike a certain other blogger, I don’t have very strong feelings about it. I don’t like the idea of buzz creeping up my inbox, but i can also turn it off, and turn off all the other stuff. So honestly, I do not care about it all that much. What does bother me is very different.

<rant begins>

Google really needs to learn about supporting its products better. My problem. Very basic. I want Google Maps to work on my cellphone. It worked for me in India. It does not work for me in Italy. I am on the latest version. I cannot remove google maps from my phone, since its inbuilt and despite my best efforts I cannot remove it.

When I went to purchase a phone, I wanted a few things. 3G, wifi, GPS. I soon realized there was no point to go for 3G since it was not available in India (and looking at the way things are now, won’t be for a long long time). wifi also did not make sense since EDGE was dirt cheap in India, and if I had wifi, the probability of having my laptop around was also very high. So all I wanted was a GPS. Well, when I saw the star I fell in love with it. But no GPS. Till he told me that it had Google maps which located you using the cellphone tower. There, I was sold.

But now, guess what. It does not work. When I start it, I get a “Serious Error. Please exit and restart”. Googling around led me to here. Turns out it has been there for sometime and not yet been resolved. Contacting a few friends in Google did not help. One of them infact, when I compared Google software to Microsoft, told me that since I do not pay Google, I should not expect any support.

Coming from the open source world, I cannot fathom a world where I cannot fix my own software. But here I am. Nothing works, and since I am on closed hardware/software, I cannot even fix it.

Not that Google helps. If you are NOT going to support software, then you might as well open source it, as opposed to leaving users in a limbo.

Well, you want the clincher? Google suggested to checkout buzz on your cellphone. I did so, and guess what. It is only for the iphone and android. Why call it a mobile platform then?!

Google, a lot of people around the world do NOT own/use an iphone or an android phone. Are you going to use microsoft like tactics to bully them onto your platform? Are you going to force people to spend a lot more money, just to be able to use Google applications?

I am disgusted!