Let me take a stab at explaining Google's grand strategy.
My friends at ZDNet call this the Google PC, or a network computer.
Well, sort of. You may, instead of buying Microsoft Office, suscribe to Google's GMail and have a rudimentary office system with a gigabyte or two of storage.
But to say Google is going after Microsoft, the way we said Microsoft was going after IBM, is really to damn with faint praise.
If that were all there were to it, why would Google be planning on building out WiFi, or build out an optical network?
Google isn't aiming at Microsoft, or at IBM. It's aiming at the entire computing-telecommunications complex, building out what I'll call the Google TeleComputing Environment.
The idea is to take advantage of not only the Internet's ability to disintermediate clients, but its ability to disintermediate the phone network at the same time, and to do this in an entirely open source way.
What do I mean? Here are the ingredients:
- Universally-accessible applications, based on search.
- Universally-acessible networks, at broadband speeds.
- Universally-competitive systems, worldwide.
Google is flattening the world. More on what this means after the flip.
- You don't need a PC for access, or for applications. Bring what you have.
- You don't need a telecommunications gatekeeper. Bits are everywhere.
- Wherever you are it's all the same.
(The picture is a detail from the 1947 film "It's a Wonderful Life.")
The telecomm aspects of Google's strategy might not make sense in Korea, where you can already get multi-megabit bandwidth on demand, wired or wireless. But in the U.S., where telephone and cable companies dominate access, with help from the government, the Google strategy gives you a way to jump over all of it.
In India and Africa, where mobile networks are ubiquitous but online services of quality are scarce, you will be able to jump into Google's servers to get the services you need. Those are being built-out, and note how quick Google was to open up GMail to mobile phones.
By the same token, Chinese users may be crippled by the second-rate service they get from censored search sites, including Google.CN. But those with a Clue will be able to jump over the Great Firewall and access those applications, while those left behind will fall behind in knowledge. Eventually China either joins the world, fully and fairly, or it goes back to cow dung communism, while economic rivals such as India and Singapore rise.
It's a grand design, based on principles Scott McNealy (among others) have been talking about for years, maybe decades.
But they've just been talking about it.
Google is out to do it.
And that may change the world in ways even Bill Gates could not have imagined.
So long as Google maintains its own credibility.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. mark ranford on September 20, 2005 11:37 PM writes...
Glad you pointed googles wifi moves out for us.
This is vision of the world I really like and I can only hope Google are able to push us towards this faster. Essentially a world where everything is a fluid decentralised network built out from the edges.
Distributed power sources (intelligrid)
Distributed wifi (mesh networked)
Distributed personal communications (voip)
Distributed services (various p2p services)
Centralised web OS (ala google , but also the many new ajax based services (writely - web version of ms word), (zimbra, ajax web version of outlook)
Distributed personal data (we own our data, eg Eric Gradmans Personal Information File - his thesis)
Everyone owns their personal Portal (eg My Yahoo/My Google, but actually its not Yahoo or Google its yours)
Participatory (read AND WRITE) web
Dsitributed Media (ie TV, Radio, and text media published by the massess for the masses - via easy to use publishing tools and easy to use media subscription - RSS (and RSS with enclosures) blogs, podcasting, vlogs, accessed on demand TIVO style - Partcipatory Cultures Bradband Machine and DV, Mefeedia, Our Media etc)
Distributed self organizing systems (eg Open Source communities - Linux, Wikepedia and the endless lists of new open source apps )
Distributed Virtual enterprises (made up of self organizing networks of entrepreneurs)
Distributed democracy (The many many edemocracy/personal democracy movements gaining traction and momentum)
Distributed / Open source education (MIT Open source courseware for example)
and so on.. Open Source as a driver for new agile, transparent and innovative organizations that operate effectively in a world of massive and accelerating change
If we look at the thousands of moves happening on so many fronts, there does seem a strong convergence to a distributed self organizing world. There seems to be such a strong attractor to the underlying common principles that I feel its a certainty thats where we will be at some point in the future, and it may be soone r than we expect becuase things are accelerating and best of all most things are all pulling in the same direction, they are reinforcing each other.
All the best, and thanks for the short piece, it reignited some passions of mine :-) Mark
Permalink to Comment2. Bill Tozier on September 25, 2005 11:10 AM writes...
I'd argue that there are at least two other stranglehold monopolies in the sights: the traditional hierarchical Academy, and the print publishing system.
One will be blindsided; the other is already putting up a struggle.
Permalink to Comment3. Betsy Markum on November 18, 2005 01:57 PM writes...
I can't believe it, my co-worker just bought a car for $34883. Isn't that crazy!
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