Google Now

The debate among users of the leading mobile operating systems seems to revolve around what is not the real center of gravity. Everybody talks about apps and application ecosystems. iOS has this and Android has that and Blackberry is falling behind and Microsoft...

Apps are important. But far more important is the Cloud behind them. Users of the iOS 6 Apple Maps learned this hard way. And when I think "the Cloud behind", the winner is obvious.

Google's strength is exposed to the limits in the Google Now app, which is a standard component of the "Jelly Bean" Android 4.1. The Now seems innocent, or even invisible, in the beginning. And then in a very subtle, yet jaw-dropping style it starts augmenting the mobile moments.

My Google Now arrived with the Galaxy Note II a few weeks ago. I have got used to the traffic jam notifications and ETA (estimated time of arrival) Google Now offers me every morning and every afternoon. But this week I went on a short one day trip to Munich. And I was continuously surprised by what I experienced with the Now.

It started at 4.30 AM when I woke up. Pulled the notification bar and saw an item referring to my morning Lufthansa flight. How...? How does it know...? - was my first reaction. I never put any particular information about the flight on the phone. Neither did Lufthansa. So I clicked the [LH 1627, departs 06:35] item. It showed me the departure terminal and gate, arrival time in Munich and offered to navigate me to the airport.

It also gave me a hint about where it pulled the information from: "View email". The "aha" moment. So it can read my Gmail and understand what I do. Wow. Yes I got the boarding passes delivered to my Gmail account. That is how it figured out I would be flying to Munich that morning.

I landed. Google Now offered more as soon as I turned off the airplane mode. It obviously knew (time, GPS, network) I was in Munich. It offered to navigate me to NH Dornach hotel. This was the hotel I had stayed at last time I was in Munich. I was there with a different phone but obviously Google Now was pulling the information from my past context - the search history or reservation emails. It also offered me a quick English to German translation box and a PLN to EUR currency converter, alongside the usual weather information. How nice!

The beauty of Google Now is it stays almost invisible. Does not distract me in any way, yet offers very relevant information at my fingertip. I almost feel the AI behind it. It is not just the application. It is the enormous power of the Google cloud behind it. I doubt any other mobile platform comes close to what Google Now is capable of. Apple teams with Wolfram to deliver the intelligence behind SiRi. But Wolfram does not have access to the personal information iPhone users keep in the iCloud. Nor it has access to the Gmail accounts many of them use for email. Blackberry cannot even come close. May be when they merge with Yahoo, but until then they can only be catching up with the rounded corners and rubber band effects. The only alternative to the Gogle Cloud / mobile ecosystem is Microsoft. But with a low singe digit market share, can they even come close?

Google Now clearly is the app designed for Google Glass wearable devices, with phones being just a testbed. It demonstrates the importance of the Cloud behind mobile devices. The game is no longer about devices accessing Web pages. It is about devices being mobile portals to the powerful Cloud - based computing power and artificial intelligence. What Google has just unveiled in the Now I consider especially a serious threat to Apple. The threat has always been in the making but now has materialized. The threat of Apple being reduced to a maker of disconnected devices.