Whether Feedburner will start to “prefer” Google Reader or vice versa (it may or may not happen), this issue of cross-integration will grow in scale over time, as it already grew in the past: in each of Google’s services, Google throws some weight towards other of its services. Most of these seem so natural when we think of Google’s point of view that we forget there’s any bias at all. Blogger “prefers” AdSense; Google web search “prefers” Google Finance; Picasa Web Albums “prefer” the Google Account; Gmail “prefers” Google Calendar; Gmail also “prefers” Google Spreadsheets; Orkut “prefers” Google Video and YouTube; Google web search “prefers” Google Maps; Google Products/ Froogle/ Google web search, AdWords and AdSense “prefer” Google Checkout, and so on.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-22-n50.html


just like microsoft

Interesting presentation on how fitting them all together may be positioned:

http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/groups/sdg/courses/symposium-2007/presentations/WS4-google-apps.pdf - The role of Google Apps in UK Higher Education

Of course. They've noticed the trend of increased commoditization of operating systems and are trying to follow the same strategy on the web that Microsoft did for the operating system.

A tightly coupled ecosystem of mediocre/okay applications wins out eventually against a bunch of uncoupled but brilliant applications.

So OpenID is really a threat to them, since the only value of coupling a calendar to email is that I don't have a separate login.

And:

* Adding events directly from email.
* Viewing events and emails together and linking them via context.
* Creating an outlook style interface so you can do both together.

They've attempted the first. Not the third or second though.

* Ripping off outlook-style meeting requests -- send to everyone's gmail shows up in everyone's gcal