I found this very interesting article on Google I wanted to share with you. Please leave any comments you have below at the end of the article.
Microsoft first - then Google wants world domination
John Naughton
Sunday February 25, 2007
The Observer
Psst … want a $64 trillion question? Well, here it is: what is Google up to? I don’t mean what is it doing in public; I mean what is the company really up to?
The simple-minded answer is that it’s going after Microsoft. After all, this week Google announced that it was bundling its ‘data in the cloud’ applications (email, instant messaging, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets) in a commercial package called ‘Google Apps Premier Edition’, which will sell for $50 per annum and comes with 10GB of storage per user, application programming interfaces to enable data migration, technical support and a guarantee of 99.9 per cent availability. It’s basically an online Office suite and is targeted at small businesses, schools, universities, clubs and social groups.
Google executives went to great pains to pooh-pooh the idea that they were targeting Microsoft Office. ‘We are not in this to get Microsoft,’ said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s business software division. ‘We are in this to offer more compelling choices for consumers and businesses.’ Quite so.
And it may well be that for some organisations, the prospect of being able effectively to outsource their office IT operations for $50 per employee per year may be attractive - especially when they realise that to get the Google services they don’t need to pay for Windows licences either: all they need is Firefox running on Linux - both free programmes.
Recently, a Merrill Lynch analyst estimated that Microsoft Office cost companies $60 to $120 annually per user, assuming the software is used over a two- to three-year cycle.
And that doesn’t include the cost of the operating system or of the level of technical support needed to run a Microsoft-based network. It’s been reported that Google already has more than 100,000 small businesses using Google Apps and that ‘hundreds’ of universities have allegedly signed up for the education version of the package.
On the other hand, Office has more than 450 million users worldwide, and we know from experience that the pace of transition from one computing paradigm to another can be glacial.
So I can’t see many people in Microsoft’s Seattle HQ getting too worked up about the latest Google move, however many waves it causes in media circles.
As it happens, I suspect that Google’s canny onslaught on Microsoft is just a diversionary sideshow. Something much bigger is afoot. It’s about bandwidth, infrastructure and - ultimately - effective control of the net.
Here are two clues. First, Google is currentlya very profitable company. It has money to burn, and it’s been burning it in some interesting ways. Chief among them is the purchase of colossal amounts of network bandwidth - the fibre-optic cabling that forms the backbone of the net.
PBS columnist Robert Cringely reports a recent conversation in which a bandwidth broker - someone who buys and sells bandwidth on fibre-optic networks around the world - told him that Google now controlled more network fibre than any other organisation on the planet.
Second, Google has been building large numbers of data centres - ’server farms’ with tens of thousands of computers in each - and locating them all over the US and elsewhere in the world.
The company is very secretive about this for reasons of security, which is fair enough. But people have begun to notice that some of these distributed data centres are situated near electrical power-generation plants.
So we have two curious facts: Google has acquired fabulous amounts of bandwidth capacity, for which it has no obvious use; and it’s putting local data centres all over the place. Why would it be doing this? What’s the factor that links these two observations?
The answer is simple: video. You may have noticed in the last six months how YouTube has transformed computers into a natural platform for watching video. And this is just the beginning. We’re moving towards a world in which a significant amount of television programming will be delivered via the internet.
Indeed, you could say that we’re almost there already: it’s been estimated, for example, that half of all internet traffic is now generated by BitTorrent, a file-sharing application that is being used mainly to transfer video files (many of them illicit) over the network.
But BitTorrent is a minority sport. Most people have never heard of it. What will happen, however, when getting hold of video via the net becomes a mainstream activity?
The answer is that the network, in its current form, won’t be able to cope. And that’s before high-definition television - which is even more of a bandwidth hog - becomes commonplace.
The obvious solution to the problem would be to have an infrastructure that consisted of tens of thousands of localised data centres (which could cache video content), linked by high-speed fibre-optic channels.
Any company which had built such an infrastructure could effectively dictate its own terms, because only it could deliver what consumers had learned to crave. Such a company would, in effect, control the world.
If that comes about, we will have been well and truly Googled.
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