Google's one-of-a-kind computer network gives it a chance to surpass Microsoft to become the most dominant company in tech, according to the author of a recently published book on the search giant.
Google already has plenty of influence. It handles nearly half of the world's Web searches. It's hiring some of the biggest names in the industry, from Kai-Fu Lee of Microsoft to the legendary Vint Cerf. And it has become such the topic du jour in Silicon Valley that its search for a new corporate chef warrants significant local news coverage.
But what's next? Author Stephen Arnold has closely analysed Google patents, engineering documents and technology and has concluded that Google has a grand ambition — to push the information age off the desktop and onto the Internet. Google, he argues, is aiming to be the network computer platform for delivering so-called virtual applications, or software that allows a user to perform a task on any device with an Internet connection.
"Google is this era's transformational computing platform and could be about to unseat Microsoft from its throne," Arnold writes in a summary of his ebook, The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software, published this month.
For all of its wild success, about 99 percent of Google's revenue still comes from advertising, mostly from Internet keyword searches. Certainly, it has built on the core business, adding everything from the Gmail free Web-based email service to Google Earth, a satellite mapping service. And it has plenty of cash to spend on new technology — nearly $7bn in cash, $4 billion alone from a secondary stock offering on 14 September.
The big question, of course, is what exactly chief executive Eric Schmidt & Co. plan to do with that war chest.
In his ebook, which is available in PDF form only, Arnold concludes that Google has created a supercomputer ready to deliver a host of applications to anyone with a Web browser.
"Google is setting itself up to be...
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Talkback
IN case people haven't figured it out yet. Google Earth and similiair are just the beginning.
The author of this report has obviously not taken a detailed look at what WinFS will provide. To compare Google Desktop Search with WinFS is misguided and misleading.