Personally I have mixed feelings about this.
There's actually a search engine startup in Albuquerque which is actually that one tiny bit better than Google. I kind of expect Google to buy them up sooner or later. http://www.gigablast.com/ The thing is, their web site says that they hope to outdo Google. That's ridiculous. Google's real asset isn't its search; it's the Google filesystem. GFS holds nearly the entire Web in RAM. This enables Google to be incredibly fast. Even without the brand recognition, you can't displace Google without an equivalent or better filesystem. Because of this I think Google might actually be a lot more similar to Microsoft, in the long term, than you would expect. Their principle asset is essentially an operating system. They're already building a data-center-in-a-box. It's already possible to pick up a Linux box for $200 which is the size of a keychain. In ten years, it might be possible to pick up a **data center** for $200 (or the equivalent) which is the size of a keychain. At that point, data centers will be a commodity, and Google will be in the business of controlling access to the operating system all these commodities require. That's Microsoft's business model. The difference is that the initial technology Google started with was genuinely the best in the field, while you can't say that about Microsoft, but its ultimate destiny could well be very similar. Google's positioned to control the world, as long as the world keeps using information the way it does. However, advances in robotics make it highly likely that the amount of information exchanged over the Internet in ten to twenty years is going to be an extremely large number of orders of magnitude larger than the current amount of information exchanged over the Internet. It's not just that human use will increase, or scale to multimedia; the minute you get a safe self-driving car, accidents will disappear, insurance companies will scale down to the size of gnats, the economic efficiency of all industries which use shipping in any manner will increase dramatically, and the amount of information exchanged over the Internet will mushroom to a volume unimaginable today. Rodney Brooks is already shipping prototype self-driving robot vehicles to Iraq and Afghanistan for the US military. In Japan, prototype robot security dogs with built-in webcams are already patrolling a few very expensive corporate offices. It's only going to take time for advances in robotics to create huge demand for commodity data centers. Many of the most effective artificial intelligence techniques are statistical techniques which require extremely large volumes of data. Machine translation is a good example; Google has an excellent working prototype that can translate from Arabic to English without errors, performing much, much better than the industry standard: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0602/p13s02-stct.html There are two reasons for this superior performance: superior engineers, and the Google filesystem, which allows those superior engineers to perform statistical analyses on much, much larger volumes of data than ever before. Fast forward about ten years. If you have a commodity data center the size of a keychain capable of storing Google-equivalent data ranges, bam, you've got a universal translator which fits in a keychain. Of course it'd make more sense just to use a WiFi box that gives you the same result without waiting a decade for the technology to miniaturize, but the point here is the inevitable demand for commodity data centers. It would be extremely useful for self-driving vehicles to be able to process equivalent data ranges with equivalent or superior results. Little baby robot trucks are already following soldiers and humvees all over the deserts of Iraq. Those little baby robot trucks might not actually have any business being there, any more than the soldiers or the humvees, but that's another topic entirely, and you can hardly blame a robot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point is that they exist, and if they can already follow humvees and soldiers across rocky terrain without crashing into the humvees or running over the soldiers, putting them on the highway isn't an if, it's just a when. And when that when hits, these things are going to want to process and exchange a **lot** of data. The first robot truck to traverse the American highways will definitely have a human driver at the wheel just in case anything goes wrong, but it could also very well be carrying a Google data center in a box as its payload. The more robot trucks, the stronger the impetus for those data centers to miniaturize, and the more they miniaturize, the more useful they become. But when this happens, those data centers become commodities, and Google becomes the next Microsoft. (That being said, they'll probably do a lot of cool stuff before that happens. I mean they've got time. They're not under the gun or anything.) On 11/20/05, Douglas Roberts <doug at parrot-farm.net> wrote: > Bingo. > > On 11/20/05, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote: > > World domination for less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements, > > sounds good to me. > > > > > > -- > Doug Roberts > 505-455-7333 - Office > 505-670-8195 - Cell > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at Mission Cafe > Wed Lecture schedule, archives, unsubscribe, maps, etc. at > http://www.friam.org > > -- Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/ |
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