Nikhil Dev

Great post about what Google is up toby Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer witha custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an accounton. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anythingthat’s been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the companyexactly:Google is a company that has built a single very large,custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. Theymake their big computer even bigger and faster each month, whilelowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a generalpurpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.Whilecompetitors are targeting the individual applications Google hasdeployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computingplatform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running theworld’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shoppingprice comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellowpages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computerand most advanced operating system?

I(and the 1GB of storage in particular)…and that Skrenta had made theargument so well. This weekend, as I hacked through a bunch of XHTMLand CSS for an upcoming site redesign, I jotted down a few notes for afollow-up on a post I made over a year ago called Google is not a search company. I was going to call it “GooOS, the Google Operating System”.

My notes contained two of Skrenta’s main points: the importance ofthe supercomputer and the scores of Ph.Ds being Google’s main assets. Athird key asset for Google is the data that they’re storing on those100,000 computers. As I said in that post:

Google’s money won’t be made with search…that’s smallpeanuts compared to selling access to the world’s biggest, best, andmost cleverly-utilized map of the web.

So. They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how peoplemove around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfectplace to store this map (one of the world’s largest computers that’sall but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading thismap. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they knowwho wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they’re about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.

Tim O’Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into “the emergent Internet operating system”; the small pieces loosely joining,if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all bythemselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces bythemselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scaleand avoid the difficulties of interop.

Google isn’t worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft’s searchefforts…although the media’s focus on that is probably to theiradvantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyonecan have free unlimited access to the world’s fastest computer runningthe smartest operating system? Mobile devices don’t need big, bloatedOSes…they’ll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS. UsingGnome and Linux as a starting point, Google should design an OS fordesktop computers that’s modified to use the GooOS and sell it rightalongside Windows ($200) at CompUSA for $10/apiece (available freeonline of course). Google Office (Goffice?) will be built in, with allyour data stored locally, backed up remotely, and available to whomeverit needs to be (SubEthaEdit-stylecollaboration on Word/Excel/PowerPoint-esque documents is only thebeginning). Email, shopping, games, music, news, personal publishing,etc.; all the stuff that people use their computers for, it’s all there.

Even though everyone’s down on Google these days, they remain themost interesting company in the world and I’m optimistic about theirpotential and success (while also apprehensive about the prospect ofusing Google for absolutely everything someday…I’ll be cursing theGoogle monopoly in 5 years time). If they stay on target with theirplans to leverage their three core assets (which, if Gmail is anyindication, they will), I predict Google will be the biggest and mostimportant company in the world in 5-8 years.