PR Ain't What It Used To Be

I was asked by the person who heads up the Public Relations Certificate Program at McGill University if I would be interested in speaking to her class about PR and the online world. After two years of doing a quick one-hour skip n’ hop through the murky waters of areas like online PR, Blogs, RSS feeds, e-zines, etc… I was asked to be involved with the curriculum and development of the program (tres cool – as we say in Quebec).
On top of that, this past Monday I guided the class through a mock case study. The first half of the class was another introduction to the world of PR (I showed them the crazy video of some dude popping a Kryptonite Evolution 2000 U- Lock with a Bic pen – see it here) – and then we discussed a communications plan for Google should they decide to launch a web browser. I know there was a lot of speculation about it (see here) and I thought it would make an interesting “hypothetical” case study.
As we walked through the variables, I began to realize how much of the online space Google is already in. We may immediately think of search, but they’re in my toolbar, they’re on my desktop, I got me a GMail account, I like the Blogger, I get news alerts, I’ve fiddled with Froogle and they even hold a coveted spot on taskbar. A browser doesn’t seem like a far stretch… but what will Microsoft