Getting blown away in the bandwidth explosion

...a TV strategy — ok, of course it does. It will be indexing, archiving and delivering the world's television before you can say "Murdoch who?" — but when it wants to play, it can just publish a client on its network and offer something at the other end too darn tempting to resist. Meanwhile, that network is busy moving databases, software services, telephone calls, IM, big maps of the world. The fatter the pipes we users have into the Internet, the better the Googlesphere looks. All its money comes down those pipes, all its money moves over its network.

Microsoft's latest reorganisation is much more buttoned down: applications software is different from operating systems is different from games. You might need to mix them up to build, say, a games computer that's connected to a media centre consuming online services, but you will have to buy your games computer and your media centre and your online services, and trust us to make it all work together. Software services, as it sees them, live entirely in that frame. Control resides.

Google thinks different. It knows that with smart-enough clients and fast-enough bandwidth, all you need to do is dress up digits, serve them hot and take your cut. Make it open — others will flood in and fill any gaps, mash the bits up, find ways of making money while making you money.

Take games. Why spend billions building an expensive, hard to control, obsolete-from-launch games console, discounting it, getting it out through the retail channels and waiting to get the money back on the games? You can build much more efficient dedicated game server farms and let smart clients suck it up through Ethernet-speed digital video feeds. All that business with DRM and trusted platforms, locking down the consoles so nobody can threaten your revenue stream only for a teenager called ZyberVole to get annoyed and crack it so you have to take them to court and get laughed at? Will never happen. Can never happen. Not an issue. Save your effort for the games.

Google doesn't have a gaming division. It may not even have a gaming strategy: then again, who are we kidding? You can bet your last battledroid that it has one and it's not dissimilar to the ideas above. The same ideas can deliver TV, the same ideas can deliver software services. Try it for free, pay as you go, heck, join in as a provider if you've got a good idea.

The only thing Microsoft has got going for its strategy is that it's worked in the past. The only thing that will stop Google is if there's a lack of global bandwidth, no way of getting it in the front door and no cheap, powerful, open clients.

I'm sitting at my desk at home with the computer of my dreams. It cost a few hundred pounds, and can do anything with sound, video and data I can wish for — if only I can get all that delivered. By early next year my 2Mbps cable net connection will have silently swelled to 10Mbps, and my LAN will be the size of the planet.

I think that will do the trick.