I thought December was supposed to be a quiet month, where people go on vacation, and companies don’t launch new things. I was wrong. This week is shaping up to be a very busy one for Google as they could have as many as three substantial launches in three days.
Monday: Tomorrow morning, the company is holding an event in Mountain View, CA to talk about the evolution of its search product over the years. That may sound ho-hum, but they are also promising to introduce a “few new features that we hope will change the way people search in the future.” Presenting will be no less than Google VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, and Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra. All heavy hitters.
Is this Google’s answer to the Bing event last week, where they showed off the impressive looking new Bing Maps beta product? You can bet that whatever they unveil, it won’t involve Silverlight. And I wouldn’t bet against it involving Twitter in some way, just like Microsoft’s announcements did.
Tuesday: This is far from certain, but word is that Tuesday could be the day Chrome for Mac beta finally gets released. We know the launch is imminent, as the beta version is now complete and the team has moved on to getting the left-out features working. But there is one bug that might hold up the launch (it popped up late after all the beta blocker bugs were previously eliminated).
It’s definitely worth noting that on the Chromium Development Calendar, December 8 (this Tuesday) is the date listed for “4.0 Beta to Beta Channel.” Chrome 4.0 is already in beta testing for Windows, and before that launched in early November, the calendar featured the same message. No word on the Linux build, but that could certainly go beta on Tuesday as well. Also worth noting is that 4.0 is scheduled to go “stable” on January 12, so that may be the Chrome 4.0 official launch (at least for Windows).
Update: Tuesday is also the day that Vevo, the venture between the music labels and YouTube is set to launch.
Wednesday: This is the day that Google will officially launch Chrome Extensions, is the latest thing we’re hearing. We noted over the weekend that at some point this week (and probably mid-week) this would happen, and it looks like Wednesday (and possibly Wednesday evening) is the day.
The one-two punch of launching Chrome for Mac beta and then having Chrome Extensions would be nice, except for the fact that Chrome for Mac beta won’t support them right away. But the latest builds of Chromium do, so everyone will be able to try out the new extensions at launch.
The Rest: So that’s the first three days of the week with possible things on each day. And if you count Sunday as the start of the week, I guess you could throw in Google CEO Eric Schmidt finally joining Twitter as another event.
Is Google going to give us a breather on Thursday and Friday? Who knows, but at this rate they’ll probably announce that they are dropping all support for IE on Christmas.
[photo: flickr/bramus]