Google is more like a modern-day Xerox Labs, except they actually *publish* and make available a good portion of what they tinker with in the labs. To me this is *awesome*, even if some (or perhaps many) of these services/systems eventually go away. With the old Xerox, many inventions that were later commercialized by others simply sat in their labs or were only implemented in very limited high-end commercial systems. Of course this was at least partly a symptom of the times where generalized consumer computing was not a major reality. Still, whether Xerox would have been doing what Google is doing today or not, I am appreciative that Google *does*. It means we get to play with a lot of things that would not otherwise have seen the light of day from most other companies, and again even though some go away eventually, I'd rather have had the opportunity - so that if nothing else others can be inspired to follow in their foot steps *if* the ideas are truly viable - than to have never been able to test myself whether an idea was actually useful to me.
- Oshyan
