[wordup] Me and Google

[Adam Shand]

Me:

I'm now a married man, somebody's husband.  Fortunately, much like the 
wisdom that was passed down to me from people I trust, it has changed 
nothing and everything is still wonderful.  We had a great time on the 
Coromandel Peninsula lounging in the sun with friends and family before 
the big day, thank you to everyone that came and helped make it 
wonderful.

On a slightly less positive note, the server which runs my web site and 
this mailing list was hacked through a stupid oversight of yours truly. 
  So it's been rebuilt over the last week which accounts for the even 
less posting then normal.

Google:

Aiding and abetting everyone's favorite conspiracy ...

From: http://www.kottke.org/04/04/google-operating-system

GooOS, the Google Operating System
posted April 06, 2004 at 12:10 am ET

Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that 
Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that 
everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are 
so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google 
by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly:

> Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom 
> computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make 
> their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering 
> the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose 
> platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
>
> While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has 
> deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing 
> platform for web-scale programming.
>
> This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social 
> networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email 
> service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do 
> next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating 
> system?

I was thrilled reading this today because I had been thinking along the 
same lines as I wondered about Gmail (and the 1GB of storage in 
particular)...and that Skrenta had made the argument so well. This 
weekend, as I hacked through a bunch of XHTML and CSS for an upcoming 
site redesign, I jotted down a few notes for a follow-up on a post I 
made over a year ago called Google is not a search company. I was going 
to call it "GooOS, the Google Operating System".

My notes contained two of Skrenta's main points: the importance of the 
supercomputer and the scores of Ph.Ds being Google's main assets. A 
third key asset for Google is the data that they're storing on those 
100,000 computers. As I said in that post:

> Google's money won't be made with search...that's small peanuts 
> compared to selling access to the world's biggest, best, and most 
> cleverly-utilized map of the web.

So. They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move 
around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place 
to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but 
incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google 
knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop 
for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those 
advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with 
friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about 
anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.

Tim O'Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into 
"the emergent Internet operating system"; the small pieces loosely 
joining, if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all by 
themselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces by 
themselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scale 
and avoid the difficulties of interop.

Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search 
efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their 
advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone 
can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running 
the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated 
OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS. Using 
Gnome and Linux as a starting point, Google should design an OS for 
desktop computers that's modified to use the GooOS and sell it right 
alongside Windows ($200) at CompUSA for $10/apiece (available free 
online of course). Google Office (Goffice?) will be built in, with all 
your data stored locally, backed up remotely, and available to whomever 
it needs to be (SubEthaEdit-style collaboration on 
Word/Excel/PowerPoint-esque documents is only the beginning). Email, 
shopping, games, music, news, personal publishing, etc.; all the stuff 
that people use their computers for, it's all there.

Even though everyone's down on Google these days, they remain the most 
interesting company in the world and I'm optimistic about their 
potential and success (while also apprehensive about the prospect of 
using Google for absolutely everything someday...I'll be cursing the 
Google monopoly in 5 years time). If they stay on target with their 
plans to leverage their three core assets (which, if Gmail is any 
indication, they will), I predict Google will be the biggest and most 
important company in the world in 5-8 years.