Nothing’s unique about
Google Pack
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Google announced their latest offering, Google pack. This is a
package of a
lot of softwares from Google and other companies which the company claimed was free.
However, an analysis of the
bundle unearths a lot of discrepancies.
Google’s contribution in the bundle includes Google Earth, Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Toolbar and Google Pack Screensaver softwares. The external ones are: Adobe Reader 7, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Gallery Player HD Images, Mozilla Firefox, Norton Antivirus, Picasa, Real Player and Trillian.
First of all there is nothing new in the bundle that has the potential to drastically change the life of someone using the bundle.
Most of the applications bundled in this package that can be downloaded free from http://pack.google.com have already been around. They are already available free in the public domain, from either Google’s site or from the site of their manufacturer.
An inexperienced PC user may while loading, allow all the programs to boot at start-up, thus eating up precious computer memory. Also, most of the applications requires an online registration, a process that is often very cumbersome.
A few bundles are free only for a particular time. E.g. Norton Antivirus is free only for six
months after which you have to pay up for updates.
Most of the software in the bundle has a lot of features disabled. One has to pay to use them.
However, this is only the beta version of the bundle. It is
expected that in the next few months, Google will come out with a more complete package. This package is expected to include Open Office, thus making it worth the download.
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