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December 16, 2009

When Google Runs Your Life....

Very nice article in Forbes this month on Google and their strategy in the cloud. Has some nice background on Schmidt and his relationship over the years with Microsoft (or lack of). Nice article.

Link on Forbes to full story

Your day begins with a wake-up call from your Google Android phone. As you run to the shower, you hit Google News and check headlines, then Gmail. Your first appointment of the day has been moved to a new location; Google Maps will direct you there. Quickly update your expense report--including the printout of that sales presentation using, say, Google Template--and shoot them to the back office in India (in Hindi, if you prefer, with Google Translate). Your boss wants to discuss your group's contributions to some marketing documents? Lean on Google Groups. You're not even out the door yet. You have the rest of the day to search for work-critical information on the Web while you're at the office--to say nothing of snatching a few moments to download a game, check stock prices, organize your medical records, share photos and pick a restaurant and movie for the evening. How convenient.

And a little creepy, perhaps. Google ( GOOG - news - people ) wants to own your every waking minute online--at home, while in transit, at your workplace, wherever you happen to be. It makes connectivity oh so easy, on a desktop, laptop or mobile phone. How much easier via a little-known business called Google Applications that allows us to instantly share Google calendars, spreadsheets, memos, reports, e-mail, corporate blogs, presentations and more--much, much more--by storing them in Google's enormous data centers. These bundled office-suite services make Google money on subscriptions, but they are also something of a Trojan horse to pull more people onto the Internet so that Google can make even more money from ads. By expanding what kinds of information people organize and share, as well as what they search, Google makes users ever more dependent on it to get through the day. But just who is in control here?

Eric Schmidt, Google's owlish chief, sounds so reasonable. "Our model is just better," he says. "Based on that, we should have 100% share." As for that other company battling to take over your online life? Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) "has many issues, including fixing the problems with their products," says Schmidt.

Microsoft isn't exactly rolling over. It's getting a boost from the early success of its search engine, Bing, and Windows 7; Office 2010, with a Web-based version of its software, looks promising. Recent discussions with News Corp. ( NWS - news - people ) about paying for content and blocking that content from Google demonstrate Microsoft's eagerness to challenge Google on every front.

The three-year-old business of Google Apps is easy to miss, given the long shadow of the company's online ad business, which has 60% of its market and will pull in the bulk of Google's $22 billion in revenue this year. Off to the side will be another $750 million or so largely from sales of Google Apps to corporations for $50 per user per year, a fraction of what Microsoft Office sells for. But Schmidt's vision is about more than money. As Apps becomes tied to a Google computer operating system (Chrome OS), Google mobile computing (Android) and Google's application-friendly Web browser (Chrome), it promises--or threatens--to reshape both the tech landscape and the way we work and play.

Google's Chrome Web browser is designed not just to connect your computer to the Internet. It will also let Google Apps operate even when you're not online, just the way Office does. Google is developing an operating system slated to appear a year from now in netbook computers that will cost under $300 (maybe even free, with an App subscription) and be dedicated to the Chrome browser. This new netbook goes from off to online in ten seconds. A recent demo of Chrome OS featured the Pandora online music player, a service that allows you to name your favorite music, then sends you tunes similar to what you apparently like (based on roughly 400 attributes) and enables the creation of 100 personal "stations." Android, an open-source mobile phone operating system introduced in October on a new line from Motorola ( MOT - news - people ), brings with it a small universe of Google computing power, including new gps navigation systems with such features as predicting traffic congestion.

Posted by Staff at December 16, 2009 09:19 PM

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