Google: Time for world domination?

...an application delivery system for any type of device," said Arnold, who has been a technology and financial analyst for 30 years. He has helped build the technology management practice at Booz Allen & Hamilton, served as a technology strategy officer at Ziff Communications, and worked on US West's electronic yellow pages and personalization tools used by @Home. "That is a different type of paradigm from Microsoft's [desktop-centric world]," he said.

Arnold's research goes well beyond speculation that Google will buy Chinese portal Baidu.com, in which it already owns a small stake, or move further into the soon-to-explode VoIP market, beyond its voice chat-enabled Google Talk instant-messaging service.

The notion of a network computer isn't new. Sun chief executive Scott McNealy has for years been saying "the network is the computer." Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison formed a company around the idea. It was called the "New Internet Computer Company," and it sold Web surfing devices before shuttering two years ago.

But unlike Sun and Oracle, Google's timing could be impeccable, Arnold argues. "Sun defined it. Ellison tried to build it. But Google owns it," he said.

The secret sauce
In short, from early on, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page resourcefully figured out how to cluster lots of cheap servers and open source software, configured in parallel, according to Arnold.

Indeed, Google representatives proudly display the company's unique rack-mounted server system to visitors to the Mountain View, California, campus.

"Google's architecture can scale. Using commodity hardware, Google can deploy more capacity at a lower cost and more quickly than a competitor relying on a system built with brand-name hardware," Arnold writes in his book.

Google's move into Web services — its Desktop Search and Sidebar products, for example — has prompted Microsoft to reorganize and combine MSN with its platform products group to help the software giant fight off Google's encroachment on its turf, said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research.

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