Cobb

Cobb, great article and visionary thoughts. Why not trust the "Googlites" with our proprietary and private information? They certainly have access to the majority of our online activities anyway!

I also respect their fortitude in maintaining their simple and clean home page strategy against incredible pressure they must receive from advertisers to turn that valuable real estate into a visually challenged minefield of Madison Ave. double speak.

Go Google.

In an internet where CNN's webpage has asinine mortgage rate ads and pop ups I too am glad that Google has kept their page clean. Its simple loading is the main reason it's set as my home page.

"This was back in the day when disk drives were all we had, and Iomega was considered the best possibility for backup." Hehe. I remember when I thought I was cool for having two 100MB Zip drives daisy-chained. There is definantly a market for home users to back up their libraries of data, and to do it all in one shot. Everyone who has ripped gigabytes of music for their iPods are not going to want to go through that again if their system crashes. I can't tell you how many Maxtor external drives I have helped install for clients just so they can backup their music directories from time to time. I'm sure the same could be said for personal photo/video albums too.

At the same time, there is a growing concern that Google will, at some point, begin to look more and more like Microsoft, in terms of their business practices as well as their product offering. There was an article (I believe it was in the NYT about 2 months ago) published that outlined some fairly detailed similarities in how Google operates now and how Microsoft operated in its early years.

Point being, what if Google does the sorts of things you envision, then does an about face and makes us regret it? All it may take is one idiot CEO to turn the tide...

I'm old enough to remember when everybody hated IBM the same way people hate Microsoft today. At the time, Microsoft, Digital and Unix (but not Mac) were seen as the competition. Those were huge differences over which there was no choice whatsoever. To share data between DEC and IBM was close to impossible, and the gap between the PC and mainframe world was huge. If you think waiting for fixes to MS is crazy, you should have lived then. You couldn't even presume to ask IBM for a fix.

The difference was that in the hate IBM days, you really didn't have a choice, whereas with Microsoft you do.

Google is a service. It is a free service and there are no mandated standards for Google. It's a completely different animal. The Google search monopoly (if you could call it that) is all added-value, which is to say, there is nothing that Google does that anybody needs. Google only grows by innovation, because nobody is really dependent on anything Google provides.

Think about it. Would your company force you to use Google and block other search engines? A service monopoly, I think, is very different from a technology monopoly. The only way Google maintains a service monopoly is by offering the best service at the lowest price, and by offering services you can't get anywhere else. Google is competing and winning by coming up with new ideas.

I can't envision a scenario in which you buy products which mandate the use of a Google service. What I do see are services by current companies that are embedded in a distrbuted software model that are threatened by Google Planetary IT.

One example of this is Google Earth. Compare that to ESRI. ESRI is the number one GIS software vendor. It practically has a monopoly on that. Building GIS is pretty sophisticated stuff - with ESRI tools you might build the GPS Navigation system for your BMW. Now how long is it going to take Google to put together an API to Google Maps or Google Earth so that you could do your own GPS Navigation on your commodity laptop or next gen dash-mountable PDA? A long time. And you already know the price.. Google Ads. But there may come a time when Google puts some engineers on Google Map integration with commodity GPS and EVDO and builds a free real time navigation system. Then instead of 1200 bucks or so for the option at the car dealer, it's free from Google or maybe ad-free for a basic subscription fee. That puts some embedded systems people out of business, and adds to the power of Google Maps API, that Google distributes for free...

The place to look then is how well Google supports and encourages third party developers with its API and how stable and robust that API is. Because if Google is going to be Planetary IT, that means it will have to have its own 'Open Source' API movement. Right now, my understanding is that all those people who are being co-opted into the Google API movement are happy campers.