Google Pack

» see pack.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

google pack landed during the years i was setting up other people's windows machines. computer-engineering undergrad in ankara in 2006 with ttnet adsl at home, and a steady side-supply of relatives who had just bought a hp pavilion and wanted "the things you need installed". google pack was the closest thing to a polite answer.

the pitch at ces 2006 was simple. larry page came on stage and announced that google would ship a single installer that bundled the free software the average windows user actually needed. one download with one shared updater behind it. the original list rotated over the years but the core was reliable: google earth and picasa, google talk and the toolbar, plus desktop search. on the third-party side firefox, adobe reader, skype, real player, and a free antivirus option (norton security scan was the default for most of the run). google said it had no financial deal with the third parties and that the pack existed purely for "user convenience".

for a computer-engineering student fixing the neighborhood's pcs that was a useful artifact. it solved a real problem (the 2006 windows machine arrived nearly bare and the standard fix was twenty minutes of clicking through download.com), and it did so with google's name on it, which the average uncle trusted. when i visited family in the summer of 2007 i used it more than once. by 2009 i had stopped. chrome had its own installer by then. picasa had its own installer too. the bundle was no longer the path of least friction.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the september 2011 cleanup ~

on 14 september 2011 google posted a blog entry titled "more wood behind fewer arrows" announcing a batch of product retirements. google desktop went the same day. google notebook and fast flip went too, along with a handful of other side projects. larry page was a few months into his return as ceo and the public message was that google would do fewer things better. google pack was a tidy thing to cut: the bundled apps had outgrown the pack, and chrome's own auto-updater had made the google updater redundant.

~ the unbundle ~

by the time the pack was killed it had already lost its reason to exist. chrome shipped its own installer that auto-updated silently in the background, and that pattern (silent background updater per app, no central manager) became the norm for every consumer windows install. the pack was a transitional artifact between the cd-rom-era "bundle of useful tools" magazines like pc world cover discs and the always-online single-app installer model that won.

~ what survived ~

google pack is the kind of dead product that has no real successor because the problem it solved went away. nobody installs a fresh windows machine the same way anymore. the os ships with edge built in and the microsoft store covering a stable middle tier of apps. anything beyond that gets downloaded one app at a time. for the small population of people who remember the 2006 to 2010 ritual of helping a relative fix their new computer, the pack is a clean reminder that "what should i put on this thing" was once a googleable question with a one-click answer.

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