Today’s Google Doodle: Jorge Luis Borges’ Birthday

Today, on August 24, Google celebrates the birthday of Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator Jorge Luis Borges who was born in Buenos Aires. Borges, who has published a lot, is most famous for his books ‘Ficciones’, which appeared in 1944, and ‘The Aleph’ from 1949.

Maybe you yourself have read something from his huge bibliography?

Today’s Google Doodle: Gregor Mendel’s 189th Birthday

Today, on July 20, Google celebrates the 189th birthday of Czech-German friar and naturalist Gregor Mendel who discovered Mendelian Inheritance which is why he is often called the “father of (modern) genetics”.

Mendel is particularly known for being one of the first scientists using statistical methods to examine inheritance patterns which has caused controversies among other scientists up to the present day.

Read more about Mendel on Wikipedia.

Google+ App For iPhone Available In App Store

We’ve been waiting for it for some time, now it is finally here: The Google+ iPhone app. The app seems clean and tidy, with the most important features such as Stream, Photos, Profile and Circle available directly from the home screen in its current version, 1.0.1.1809. The handling is quite self-explanatory and the app looks and feels very similar to the Android app. There are however some features missing (yet) as some users criticize in their reviews.

Some screenshots and a short discussion about the deficiencies of the brand-new app can be found in this Huffingtion Post article by Dean Praetorius.

Check out the Google+ for mobile page by Google to find out if there is a mobile version of Google+ for your mobile phone.

Today’s Google Doodle: 450th Birthday Of The Saint Basil’s Cathedral

On July 12, 1561, the famous Saint Basil’s cathedral in Moscow has been consecrated which makes today its four hundred and fiftieth birthday. Google celebrates the occasion with a doodle on their home page.

The cathedral standing on the southern end of the Red Square is one of the town’s landmarks and is officially a museum, being a subsidiary of the State Historical Museum. The cathedral can be visited and is occasionally used for ministering.

Missing The Old Fullscreen Facebook Chat?

Facebook has applied some minor changes to its own chat during the last week. The design has changed slightly and the possibility to pop out the chat to a separate browser window (or tab) has gone. If you want that old style chat back, here is the solution:

The link to the old style Facebook chat

It will open in a new window (because that’s what it’s supposed to do). Have fun and feel of course free to +1 this on Google (yes… I am finally in)!

Google Plus Open For All

After long days of “check back later” messages, Google Plus is currently available for everybody. So don’t miss to join before they change their mind again and stop letting new users in!

And of course the +1 button is available on SNSLurk now, too!

Windows Is Still Number One – How Much Longer?

Microsoft Windows is the undisputed number one on the operating system market. It has been for decades and even though smartphones are taking over the world and operating systems like iOS or Android are experiencing a huge rise at the moment, Windows will still remain on its throne for some time, if not forever.

In June 2009, Windows had a market share of over 93%, followed by Mac OS with a share of barely 5%. iOS and Linux both had shares of 1% or less, others had a cumulate share of about 0.5%.

Remembering that back in 2009 the iPhone celebrated its second birthday and considering its huge spread today, one might expect the cake to look completely different by 2011. Actually, it doesn’t. It even looks exactly the same at a first glance.

On a second glance, however, the situation is a little bit different from back in 2009. Windows now has a market share of about 88%, Mac OS has made it above the 5% bound and iOS has seven times its market share from back then, now being used by 7% of all computer-like devices. Linux has become a bit weaker but nothing much at all, other operating systems now have a good 2,5% share. Exact numbers can be learned from the following table.

Data: http://www.netmarketshare.com/

What we see is that Windows has obviously lost some market share while especially iOS has gained a lot. Let us concentrate on these two and compare them and their chances for the future since they are the two operating systems with the biggest change in market share over the last two years.

From the trend chart we see that windows has lost about 4% of market share within two years. Linearly extrapolating this, we obtain that Windows will have disappeared from the scene in about 45 years, which is of course only some simple math without much practical background. There won’t be too many people who would actually agree on the statement that Windows will be gone sooner or later and it should be added that nobody can forecast the next 45 years of development in the operating system market. It’s a pretty hard task even for the next 5 or 10 years. However, there is good reason to believe that iOS will continue its rise over the next few years.

Doing a linear extrapolation of the trend chart again, we obtain that iOS will have a market share of 10% in less than 5 years – which is actually not utopian! And – most important – this is a really bitter pill for Microsoft since it would imply that, viewed from 2009, there is a single operating system that reached over 10% market share within only about ten years from a point when Windows was virtually the only operating system with a serious market share (over 93%, as seen above).

Two things should be clear – it is neither to be expected that Windows will eventually reach a market share of 0%, nor is it likely that in twenty years or so iOS will be where Windows once used to be. The impact that Apple created with iPhone, iPad and iOS is however huge. And it will leave its mark on Microsoft and Windows in particular.

The question we have to ask is therefore how the marks on Microsoft will look like or, even more, how they will deal with them. We can only hope that their strategy to handle all this is to provide quality and learn from what happens around them. If they do good enough that will maybe even result in better market share eventually – at least there is a great potential for Windows Phone.