Google recently unveiled their newest bicycle, the winning design among several submitted to resupply the Mountain View, California behemoth’s stable of “getting around campus”-mobiles. I’m happy to report it’s awful.
That’s a good thing, though, given the various hip, high-fashion bikes they might have chosen, this crude, little chunk of bicycle shows some class by just being a bicycle. A really horrible, poorly-made, appallingly ugly bicycle.
I’m always a little amazed when engineers in one field seem to have a complete and utter lack of appreciation for engineering in another. Surely there are at least a few Googlers who find it difficult to use these, though, compared to the bike it replaces, these seem positively amazing.
I’ve been gently kicking Google in the their double-“o”s for a while now, driven largely by the fact that I think they could be doing really amazing things, and instead they can’t seem to even keep their own Google+ app working on their own Android operating system.
Credit where credit’s due, though. Sometime Wednesday night, Google Maps was updated to include turn by turn directions for bicycle routes.
That’s pretty wonderful.
It still doesn’t excuse those Google bicycles, but it’s pretty great, and should help guys like me, who read cue sheets about as well as we read tea leaves, and three times slower. You can check out the update here.
That’s all I got for today. Back to another really long day of work. Big news this weekend.
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