Thursday, January 13, 2005

Google: Poised To Be The Number One Software Company In The World

I am a die-hard fan of Google, have been since its inception. It keeps lifting you up. The most recent two lift-ups for me were, well three: (1) Gmail, (2) Google Scholar, and (3) Google Print and the news about Google digitizing some major libraries.

Google is like Wal-Mart; you walk into a Wal-Mart and you have seen their entire business model.

The idea behind Google print is monumental. It is going to transform the web. The web otherwise has been whistling along like a near empty vessel.

But Google has barely scratched the Google surface.

Let's extend the Google Print vision such that authors the world over, new and accomplished, could entirely skip the publishing industry. You are an author. You sign up and open an account with Google Print for free. You publish what and when you want to publish. All money you make is entirely through Google text-ad-click-throughs. Entire new books in all categories. There is no print version. And the complete text is online for readers for "free," kind of like shows on TV. The "price" on "books" will drop astronomically: they will be gone! No paper. No publishing company. No traditional marketing. This is nothing less than transforming the whole idea of what a book is.

Readers will also have the option to open free accounts. So they can bookmark books. And place bookmarks inside books, or take notes.

Extend that to articles. And desktop word processing becomes irrelevant, especially when people will have the option to have search-engine-protected documents also, or documents with limited circulation. You decide which Google IDs may view it.

The internet is but a fancy telephone: it is a communication tool that makes geography and more irrelevant. Makes socio-economic schisms less of a hassle. Heck, it lets you communicate with dead people through their books. You communicate with people who will be born after you are gone.

The Google Print idea extends to audio and video. For that you are talking new, bold hardware infrastructure just round the corner. An internet computer that you can buy for less than $100 that you could change like underwear if you wanted to. The point being to crack open the 6 billion mass: the more the total number of web surfers, the more money Google makes. The only thing the machine does is it takes you online, preferably at super fast speeds. Memory is a total non-issue for text-audio-video due to nano.

Text-audio-video-photo. Photos get "downloaded" straight from your camera to your online storage where you do all the editing. And all content generates revenue the same way.

See?

At that point Google becomes the number one software company in the world and keeps the throne for a few decades. IBM was a hardware company, that is why Microsoft came along as sexier. But MSFT is a desktop company, it is no dot com. Whereas Google is the sexiest dot com there is. That is why it will take over the lead.

Google is a freaking revolution!





Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

No comments: