Front Lines is a guest viewpoint section offering perspectives on current issues and events from people working on the front lines of Canada's technology industry. Mathieu Balez is vice-president and co-founder of Syllogix Inc., a management science consultancy based in Montreal.
Google Inc., Silicon Valley's latest garage-to-riches story, is metamorphosing before our collective eyes into the single most important company on the planet, if it hasn't claimed that title already.
And if you haven't been following its (near) weekly parade of new Web-based software tools, then it's time you took notice: The Internet ... nay, the entire computing experience ... nay, the fundamental way in which we access and interact with information, is soon to become radically different.
Whether it be under Google's benevolent technological hegemony or within its sinister monopolistic grasp, however, remains somewhat unclear.
It was not so long ago that looking up any piece of information, from random trivialities to important scholarly research, was a time-consuming and onerous task. These days, thanks to the magic and ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections, this task has been rendered almost routine - due in no small part to the algorithmic search fundamentals laid by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google's PhD dropout/now billionaire founders).
Thanks to the sheer size of its Web content index and to PageRank (the name they gave the mathematics used to intelligently evaluate the relevance of search results), as well as to the simplicity of their interface and the wickedly fast speed with which it returned shockingly accurate results - Google had found, with its Web Search technology, just the right mix of innovative features needed to propel it to the top of the Search space in the late 90s. It's a title the company has yet to relinquish.
Yet, in the fickle domain of the World Wide Web, eyeballs and interest can ebb and flow with devastating lack of loyalty toward superior technology (remember Netscape? ICQ? Altavista?). This, combined with the herd of cut-throat competitors and the more-recent phenomenon of profit-hungry shareholders, means Google cannot afford but to out-innovate its adversaries and lead the charge toward a brave new computing landscape.
Google's self-proclaimed mission is simple, almost child-like, to paraphrase. "To organize all the world's information." Sweeping it is however in vision, and if the company succeeds in achieving this noble quest, all of humankind will reap the rewards for years to come (if not, more speculatively, until the end of days, given the potential immortality of digital bits). Imagine the entire history of human thought and experience indexed, catalogued, and not only made eternal, but proffered to society with the tools needed to decipher and access it in the most intuitive and efficient ways possible - now that's something to shoot for.
But how to get from here to there?
Although it may seem that Google is already well-along the path toward such an information-rich Utopia, the truth is that the current state of affairs is only a first foray into the world of information retrieval. Today's smartest search algorithms still only read words as text strings, failing to make much sense (at least in the way a human would) of the ones and zeroes churning through their distributed server clusters. This lack of semantic connection is something being worked upon by the founder of the Web himself (Sir Tim Breners-Lee, at MIT) in a radical re-design of how the Web is structured and an update of the communication protocols that hold it all together.
A standards-based change may however be unnecessary if semantic awareness could be achieved by sufficiently ingenious mathematical models that could, say, use statistical techniques and artificial intelligence-based meta-crawling to extract meaning from otherwise cold and static textual characters. You can bet your lunch money that Google has this in the works on its lab bench, somewhere deep within the Googleplex.
Yet the extraction of meaning from the existing Web is but one facet of the much larger goal. After all, Google never said it would limit its information-organization expedition to only the World Wide Web.
So where are they going? The best way to divine the path ahead is by examining some of the more important technologies Google has recently released, and the acquisitions it has made.
The company has released two desktop tools: one for searching and organizing images, the other to search for files of all kinds. This points to Google's increasing interest in gaining some kind of presence (if not entire ownership) over the desktop, at least in the short term.
It has purchased a satellite imagery company (Keyhole), added local search functionality to the standard Web search, and created Google Maps - a jazzy new Web-based application that allows you to interactively use maps to get directions and find places (like a slicker, more intuitive version of MapQuest). This signals Google's intent to leverage geographical data to increase the revenue-generating potential of AdWords. Months (maybe weeks) from now Google will combine Maps with Keyhole and Local Search to provide a truly amazing (if not a little scary) way to locate destinations and be presented with relevant ads.
It has purchased Blogger, a popular Web logging service, and created Orkut, a social-networking site that allows users to link networks of friends. This points to Google's interest in knowing more about who its users are. The sterility and static nature of the Web search experience has thus far frustrated Google by not providing a great sense of who its user are and what they like, in an individualized way. (Conversely, its publication of the Zeitgeist bears witness to their knowledge of societal interests in a broader sense.)
To make further inroads into the average user's mind, the company recently released a personalized version of Google search whereby you can customize how you'd like search results delivered, based on your varied interests. Soon Google may know everything about you, and exploit that information to help merchants sell you pertinent goods - through AdWords of course.
It has created Google News - a Web-based software application that automatically gathers and presents breaking current-events, from a wide array of media outlets. If Google views this as more than just a nifty idea, this could place it on a collision course with the entire mass-media superstructure.
The company created Google Scholar, a tool to quickly search databases of academic journals, and approached some leading colleges with offers to scan and index all their public domain tomes. This highlights Google's progress in its quest to provide instant access to all recorded human knowledge, but raises questions about the future of bricks and mortar libraries and, more widely, about the library model itself and the role Google will play in such a future. (Surely not relevant ads in library books?)
It has released a free, Web-based email service called GMail, arguably the first real salvo fired across its competitor's bows, showcasing its ability to change the rules of the game. By offering 1 gigabyte of free storage, an innovative interface and integration with its trademark search, this software is more than simply a good piece of technology, but hints strongly at a new network-centric application paradigm that Google may unveil more widely, to try and unseat its chief rival, Microsoft (more on this later).
The company is increasing the ease with which web-programmers can access its services. Google recently released a new application programming interface (API) so that developers could interact directly with AdSense, and will surely continue to open up such interfaces. By doing so, Google aims to become the de facto standard method of conducting all manners of business on the Web.
There Google's service called Froogle which helps consumers find, rank and compare on-line product purchases. How long before Google is leveraging this information against the personal information it's gathered on your shopping preferences and then cross-referencing this to its database of advertisers? Not long.
This whirlwind of hot new tech is but a sampling of the stuff Google has brought public in recent months. Even more interesting are some of the rumours swirling about upcoming technologies Google has under wraps. If anything, some prognostication will make evident the bald genius and uncompromising aptitude with which Google might pursue its goals.
First of all, Google has been noted to be purchasing large quantities of 'dark' fibre-optic capacity, on the cheap (much excess capacity was laid during those heady days of irrational exuberance) to increase its proprietary network bandwidth. To what end? Some of the most far-out rumours say that Google is developing a Skype-esque software that will allow high-quality voice communications over the Internet, costing virtually nothing to the consumer. If Google is making a play into the telecom arena, it would be a relatively late-comer in an arena that is widely populated.
Granted, having its own network capacity would allow the company to offer quality-of-service guarantees that some of its competitors could not, but there may be more here than meets the eye. Imagine for a moment what it might do with all those flashing bits lighting up its optical cables. What if the company recorded, and kept on its servers, a record of every telephone conversation ever made? (Ignore, for the nonce, the plethora of privacy concerns that jump out of the page). Now imagine it had technology that made those digitally-recorded voice calls completely searchable, as you would today search a past MSN Messenger conversation. What we're talking about here is the eventual creation of a perfect digital record of your entire memory, at your fingertips and searchable, all emblazoned with the Google logo and, certainly, some pertinent and unobtrusive advertisement. Scary? Maybe a little.
It is also most likely developing a Google-branded version of Firefox - the up-and-coming Web-browser. There is no dearth of well-supported evidence on the Web pointing to this fact. Having its own browser out there grants Google the opportunity to package all of its services in one tidy delivery channel. It also further encroaches upon Microsoft's territory.
Most significantly however, it will be the opening move on the chessboard of next-generation desktop computing. I believe Google is vying to dethrone Microsoft as the potentate of PC dominance by pulling the rug out from underneath its feet, by changing the very rules of the operating system game itself. Not unlike its e-mail and mapping software, which are entirely Web-based, Google will release an operating system that will be completely networked and centralized on its servers. You will literally no longer need any software running on your local computer (except the Google Web-browser of course, and a network connection). The computing experience will involve booting your computer, logging into the net, and having access to all your programs (and most of your data) which will reside happily in the ether - all protected and secure, we will be assured, by the good god Google.
Google will realize the vision originally put forth by Sun Microsystems (which failed to really give it any meaning) - The Network is the Computer. The reason this model is so powerful is that it greatly simplifies software distribution - when there's a problem or an upgrade, only one copy of the software must be patched and everyone benefits from the update. Users will likely benefit from a more stable computing experience (if we ignore, for the moment, network congestion issues), since the OS will be configured and optimized for high-performance on massively parallel servers.
This paradigm also does away with software piracy, since any paid applications would now become subscription-based and thus impossible to hack (barring password theft). This means a huge opportunity for most software companies and a huge downer for the warez community.
It may also spell a sunshiney future for open source software, which Google smiles upon (its servers are powered by Linux). Recall that in its rapid rise to prominence, Google has amassed one of the largest networks of hardware on the planet. Leap forward a few years, when processing power and network bandwidth are essentially infinite, and you have the perfect pre-conditions for a completely virtualized operating system and application server environment.
Why does Google want to be there? Because it leaves Microsoft out in the cold. Microsoft has structured its company around Windows - its flagship operating system that is necessarily PC-centric. To do away with the need for local software (and thus a local OS to manage its orchestration), Google would catch the Seattle giant flat-footed and hopelessly behind. Sure Microsoft has been touting its .NET application model for some time, but that model still relies heavily on the user running a local copy of Windows. Google, by one-upping Microsoft in the internet programming game, would now control the medium by which software is distributed and sold, and no doubt leverage it to dish relevant and unobtrusive advertisements.
Now, Microsoft may very well be playing this smart and developing its own network-based OS as a pre-emptive move, but that would be undermining its core Windows product and be incongruent with the company's historical 'wait-and-see' copycat approach. Unfortunately, I think this is one instance in which being slow to respond might cost Bill Gates & co. the farm.
So it's 2010. Google owns the telecom market. They've become the primary media source. They own the virtual desktop market. Where else could they be? Home entertainment of course.
Google currently sells a network search appliance to companies large enough to have network equipment, which allows those firms to use Google technology to search their Intranets and the like. Imagine a miniaturized version of such an appliance integrated into your home entertainment unit that recorded all the video coming down your pipeline (or, more likely, tagged the video source which it would already have indexed), thus rendering it entirely searchable with Google-patented video-recognition algorithms. The software would instantly recognize the images and environments contained in the video stream, allowing it to respond to your queries and, not surprisingly, place unobtrusive and directly pertinent advertisement nearby. This is further augmentation of the perfect, searchable digital memory record I made reference to in regards to its potential play into the telecom market.
When you consider the fountain of new products Google has released since it has gone public, and take into account the jaw-dropping possibilities for where it may be going, it is not hard to imagine that eventually the Googleplex will have a stranglehold over all the information we produce and consume on a daily basis.
It will then, of course, give it back to us on the silver platters of searchability and accessibility.
Such informational dominance, rightfully, raises an eyebrow or two of concern. Indeed, Google's current interest in taking over Wikipedia (a Web-based, open-source, community-editable encyclopedia) has many people nervous over its motives. Why does it want control of such a data source? Once having achieved global supremacy of the information market, would Google then turn around and start charging consumers a fee to access the informational manna they crave so dearly? Or perhaps it will stop just short of that, and instead use its information ownership and clout to simply, but effectively, box-out Microsoft, leaving the Windows-wielding behemoth to dine on the not-so-skimpy crumbs of the video game and console market.
Can Google get there? Can it really defeat Microsoft by becoming the One True Information source? Time will tell, surely, but the company is certainly positioning itself in a very forward-thinking attack formation. There is no question it has challenges to resolve, the least of which is not click-fraud, which presently threatens its primary revenue stream. And it willl also need to figure out how to further penetrate corporate markets in order to continue to satisfy market (i.e. shareholder) pressures.
Moreover, it will be incumbent upon Google to allay the community's fear with respect to the security, privacy and integrity of the mounds of data for which it will become gatekeepers. And, invariably, it will face increased viral and network intruder attacks as their prominence grows, meaning the company will be engaged into an ongoing white-hat/black-hat hacker war.
Encouragingly, Google has been hiring talent like nobody's business, and has laid the technological foundations for a future that is so awe-inspiring that it borders on frightening genius. If Sergey and Larry stick to their corporate mantra - Don't be evil - and are able to stem degeneration into the typically corrupt corporate ethos, who knows, they may just succeed in assuming the fair and honourable dominion over the world's information they so naively set out to achieve eight years ago in their garage.