14 DAY TRIAL // Japan found out yesterday that their defaulted Google homepage looked like nothing they had ever seen before. The clean white background was tainted by some tabs that weren't there the previous night, but overall the feedback the team responsible for the change received was ranging from "good" to "hell yeah!," or at least that's what it must have been, I can't really read Japanese.
The post on the Official Google Japan blog, although translated here, is pretty much unreadable. Nevertheless, as you can see in the screenshot on the left, the additions blend in nicely with everything else, and all the services that have been included in the tabs are a whole lot easier to access than in the traditional manner.
The four new tabs are named (approximately) "Featured," including Gmail, YouTube, News, Maps and Transit, "Various search," that hosts links to Image Search, Blog Search, Books and Google Desktop, "Useful tool," with Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Toolbar and, finally, "More enjoyable," and YouTube once again, Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.
By the looks of it, this revamp will prove to be rather successful, and I dare say that it would be welcomed in other Western markets, because it grants instant access to the Google slew of services. Right now, until the Mountain View based company manages to link all the accounts in the mega-project dubbed Google Accounts, it's a tad more difficult to pull such operability through.
"Our fundamental strategy is to take ideas from Japan and apply them to other markets," Emmanuel Sauquet of Google told Business Week, in regards to his company's mobile strategy. Will this also affect the other policies and strategies as well, like changing the default homepage for everybody? Gosh, I hope so, the Japan page looks almost too good to be true!