I was watching some of the interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview yesterday from the D5 conference. Bill and Steve got a question if Mac OS X and Windows applications are dinosaurs compared to new browser based applications.

Steve Jobs made a point that he thought there is room for these applications that are made to run on the desktop, but can use Internet base services. He gave an example of a Google Maps application that runs on the iPhone. He said it works better than any browser based application.

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The big Google news today is that they released a spreadsheet program that runs on web browsers. The Outer-court has a nice over view of the new Google spreadsheet program. It does not do everything that Excel does, but it does allow multi-user editing.

Google just opened their calendar application to public beta. I have been playing around with it this morning, and once again Google is making good use of Ajax on this site.

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I have been reading a lot of negative comments today about the new Google Finance site that Google added today. I guess Google is starting to loose some of their mind share.

I like Google Finance so far, but mostly because of the technologies that they are using to implement this new site. Google Finance makes heavy use of Flash widgets and AJAX. The Stock chart is linked to the headlines, so if you select a sudden drop in the share price, the headlines change to correspond to the dates of the drop. Very cool!

I have been giving Google a hard time about some of their business decisions, but I think they deserve credit for their engineering. It is nice to see that Google is using Flash.

On that note, I am giving a presentation on AJAX at the next JaxFusion user group meeting.

I try to avoid making statements if I can get away with it, but I am making an exception in this case. I have been using Google Adsense since last year.

Google just made a "Business Decision" to launch the chinese version of their search service, google.cn. One of the things that they had to do was to censor their search results in order operate in China.

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Google has added the abilty to search blogs. They are going to actual blog ping sites to gather their rss feeds. In their FAQ, they said they will add a form to submit your rss feed manually.

Just read were Google Talk works with Gizmo, the voice over IP client.

Google Talk was released today. This is HUGE! AOL, YAHOO and MSN have dominated the IM space for years. I have heard from users that if Google released an IM client, they would use it over AIM or MSN messenger.

That being said, what is really important about this is that Google Talk uses Jabber. Jabber is an open standard for Instant Messaging. If Google Talk takes off, it will acheive something that corporate IT departments have wished for for years, a standard IM protocol.

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Google has really got itself in a mess over the news.com lockout. There is another article in wired.com about what a poor decision this was by Google.

When your moto is "Do No Evil", then it really looks bad to pull this kind of stunt.