The Google Mainframe
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company provides web searching, voice chat, instant messaging, email, news, blogging, advertising, video, audio, photo scrapbooking, a shopping portal, desktop searching, and a satellite view of just about every corner on the planet. Google Earth is the name of the satellite application, but it has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
(Imagine if Microsoft rolled out software called "Microsoft Earth." Think that would scare a few folks?)
Google is everywhere, and it seems a new pastime is developing in trying to guess the company's ultimate strategy.
Robert Young, an entrepreneur spearheading Weedshare.com, a digital music service and peer-to-peer business, writes that Google may be working off the old mainframe playbook:
To some extent, Google is bringing back the of the mainframe to render Microsoft obsolete. In the future, all computing devices, whether it be the PC, mobile phone, TV, etc., will simply be terminals that "plug-in" to Google's massive grid and application services.
That led to this observation by James Governor, an analyst at the consulting firm RedMonk:
Of course Google doesn't actually use mainframes to achieve its incredible response times and capability. But then again, it doesn't need to do a lot of things mainframes do. There is no such thing as the transactional of a web search.
But Governor also acknowledges another fact: Where big corporations once installed mainframes to become, in a sense, the corporate memory, people are now signing up for Google to become their memory. Google has become, in a practical sense, an individualized, personalized mainframe.
Every conversation you have in an Instant Message can now be saved and indexed on your hard drive thanks to Google. Ditto with voice conversations over Google Talk, that can be recorded (if you download a plug-in like Hot Recorder).
Did you forget that great punch line last night in the sit-com everybody is talking about at work? Look it up on Google Video. Forget the way home? Look it up on Google Maps.
Some people seem to be waiting for Google Calendar. Who knows? That could be followed by Google Banking, Google Checkbook and Google Google (To search through everything that Google is keeping track of for you.)
Of course, any grand strategy depends on Google's ability to keep making money and attracting investors, so it can pay for research and development and marketing and infrastructure. And the company even acknowledges, in its most recent quarterly report filed with the SEC, that Microsoft and Yahoo have more resources and are major competitive threats. Google expects its revenue growth will start to decline.
At some point, too, the market may be demanding the transactional integrity of a Google search. Ever see an IT customer, a marketing executive, a banker, a Soccer Mom or a Little League Dad thrown off schedule by even one, small glitch in the plans? It's not pretty.
In a Google world, there could wind up being very little margin for error.