I m Dan Farber, editor-in-chief at ZDNet and today I want totalk about the obsession with Google with the stock price rising over $400 andevery body talking about it every where. In fact, you can t go to a conferenceor have a conversation with anyone without talking about what I m calling theGoogle Galaxy. By Galaxy, I ve pre-drawn some of it here. It s to really lookat what Google has today and try to determine where they re headed and see ifthat obsession is really justified.
Let me start with search because that s really the foundationof everything. To organize the world s information and search at the center andthat s how they got started with their page rank algorithm. And obviously,they re working hard to keep up with and stay ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft andothers who want to play in this game that s centered around search and veryimportantly, monetizing search through ads.
There s a lot more to the story. For example, you havedesktop search so that extends from the web into the hard disks of theuniverse. You have this new piece that Google came out with, Google base, whichlooks like it s a competitor to eBay, to classified ads, Craig s List. Wereally don t know at this point but I think people can look at the seed of itand say, Here s a big XML storage database, what could they do with it? EvenMicrosoft has picked up on this and has a stealth project called Fremontworking on the same kind of idea.
Recently, they introduced this notion of analyze where youcan analyze your stats from your website using this service from Google. Now, Ithink you can extend that idea out and say, If they can analyze stats likethat, what s so hard about doing something like an application for CRM? Notthat far off if they really want to do it and get into that business. Now, ofcourse, they have their automated news, video, they re into Wi-Fi. In otherwords, they re bankrolling Wi-Fi in certain cities around the country. Whywould they want to do that? Well, they re going to have more people going totheir search pages, using their kinds of services and therefore, they canconnect Wi-Fi to advertising.
Add G Talk. G Talk could morph into a more substantial VoiceOver IP service like others have such as Skype and we don t know exactly wherethey re headed with it but it seems like that s an obvious direction especiallyconsidering that they re connecting up to Wi-Fi, that they are buying all thisdark fiber and I ll put the dark fiber under here. What the dark fiber means isthat they re trying to provide — and maybe they ll stick those datacenters around some of those points which would mean they could deliver contentfaster to users, they could be more at the center. Not just of what people aredoing on their browser but of the infrastructure as well because one thing wedo know is that Google knows how to scale low cost infrastructure based mostlyon Linux and Intel or X 86 based hardware.
We ve heard about the controversy about books, digitizingall the books. Maps and local, very important area because that s where you cantake maps, local, Froogle which is their shopping service, and connect allthose up and then you connect all those back to ads and whoa, what if Googledid a wallet like a Pay Pal? Then you connect that to Froogle and you connectthat to local and maps and you connect it to ads and you connect it even totheir blogger where they ve got a service like others. You can even connect itto GMail. Who says you couldn t buy something through your mail account? Theydon t have a calendar yet but they re rumored to be having a calendar so it isalmost endless.
Even from Google, you can extend out and say what aboutGroups? They have Groups. Okay, what about social networking? The notion ofsocial networking, bringing Groups together. How about people who shop ingroups and get group discounts and how about connecting groups into ads. It sjust an endless mash up. The issue here is that what Google has is a great mashup of technology that s based purely on having the Internet available which isunlike where Microsoft is at and now is really trying to compete in this space.
I have one last word which is all of this is beta, meaningit s still a grand experiment and yet, you can see all the value that s beengenerated by Google and others in this space. So it is obviously far more thanjust an obsession. It s far more than just beta but yet, when you think aboutit in the long term, we re still in very much the beta, in fact, perhaps thealpha stage of this formation of a galaxy that s Internet based.
