What will Google be like 10 years from now? (or may be even 5)
Over the past year there has been a lot of discussion of what Google is up to next. In certain ways Google seems to be an open company — yet in other ways, very secretive. Today I read a very interesting article by Robert Cringely entitled “Google Mart.” If you are curious about Google’s long term plans, you need to read this.
Wonder why Google has bought up thousands of miles of dark fiber? No, Google doesn’t want to be a super ISP. According to Cringely ISPs profit margins are too small — and this just isn’t what Google is good at. Instead, Google is going to be using the fiber to create a redundant internet & locally host web-based apps (hello, AJAX.)
Google is manifesting all the hype we heard back in 1999 about the web changing everything. The difference is, this company really is doing it. Scary? Good? Bad? Downright ugly? You decide. For me, Google is where my paycheck comes from. Right now, I’m leaning toward good.
Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.
