Google Unveils The Google Pack

7hunderstruck writes “Google yesterday announced the release of Google Pack, a ‘free collection of essential software’. Along with Google’s own programs, such as Google Toolbar and Google Earth, Google Pack contains Firefox, Adobe Reader, a six month subscription to Norton Antivirus, and Trillian as well as other apps. Any respectable /. user should have most of this suite installed already (excluding a few things), but it will be nice to make it all widely available to the general public.”

Google has slid well down the slippery slope towards evilness with this. Their choices are questionable at best. Norton in particular has in my experience and reading been the single worst set of products I've ever had to remove from anyone's computers.

Tried out Google Earth again just yesterday. It seems to be a wonderful way to totally lock up a computer. After having to force a power-off on my WinXP laptop twice while fiddling with Google Earth, I removed it.

Google Desktop is an amazing resource hog. After a recent re-build of my laptop I was thinking about ditching Lookout. Some co-workers recommended Google Desktop. I tried it out for about three weeks. It took literally days to index my email and documents. It never found things I searched for unless they were several days old (yes, I'm old, I use search to search for things I received yesterday. Also I get a ton of email at work). And it made the laptop amazingly sluggish. Results: I'm back to Lookout.

Trillian is another questionable and surprising choice given that one of the authors of GAIM was recently employed by Google. GAIM is cross-platform (and that does not mean "runs on multiple versions of Windows").

Update: Meant to come back and fix this. There was no mention of Trillian in the Google Pack, that was purely an invention of the posting on slashdot. Teach me to not check the primary source.