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At Flexewebs we are fascinated by Google and its technology led developments. We try to outline the way in which Internet may look in not such far future.
Web is understandably, perhaps more than ever, saturated with stories and speculations about the likely future of web and computing itself. Here at Flexewebs we though we might try and give our (dare we say) educated guess on how the future of computing may look like in the years to come.
Our story here revolves around the fastest growing and arguably most influential company of all time, Google. Google, the so-called 'search engine' company, has been coming out with the highest (visible) number of new services and products on the web compared to any other (Internet) company.
Some of the note-worthy and perhaps unusual products which Google has created or acquired in recent months have been the likes of Writely, Sketch Up, Google Checkout, Google Earth and Google Calendar. In order to be able to support the level of service all these applications require, Google has been working very intensely on building the world's most powerful super-computer, which is a creation built from clusters of servers and mainframes all working in a cleverly connected mesh. Speculations are that these machines are built from as many as half a million server units and constantly growing.
An important aspect of this story lies within Google's business model. Their aim is to organise the world's information, and this mainly refers to the information published on the web, but also the information on people's individual desktops PCs (or Macs). In order to do this, Google needs to have access to users' machines in as open manner as possible. Initiatives like the Google Base and Google Desktop have been a step towards this, but they are still relying on the user giving a sort of 'individual approval' for information to be passed onto Google (e.g. if you are using Picasa, you can publish information in bunches known as photo albums).
The whole 'organise people's information' initiative will be moving towards an architecture where Google will want to store everyone's information on their own super-computer, which will be able to data-mine that information and 'learn' about people and their preferences. The way in which all of this may work in the future is described now.
Your future information processing machine will not have a storage device on board. It may not even have a processor. It may need to have plenty of cache and RAM memory in order to process display-based information (such as pictures on the screen and audio). Otherwise, everything else will be processed and stored on Google's mega-super-fast and ultra-powerful supercomputer.
Once you buy your future personal computer you may find that the first time your power it up you will not have an 'operating system', but rather an option to sign up or sign into your preferred service provider. If you choose Google, you will automatically be connected via Internet to your account on Google's super-computer and your 'working environment' will be configured within next few seconds.
You will have Picasa for photo editing, Google spreadsheets for spread sheeting purposes, word processing through Writely, Google Calendar for organising your time, Google Checkout for selling and buying pretty much anything on-line, Google base as your 'hard drive', Gmail for sending and receiving email and that is pretty much it.
Current limitations of having to carry your machine (laptop) around with yourself in order to port your information around will be overcome. As long as you have Internet access you will be able to 'hot-desk' from any machine seamlessly without missing a single piece of functionality or anything causing you problems.
Companies like Google will be able to make money from users who use the services through all innovative forms of advertising. The company will gain such a good understanding of users, their likes and behavioural patterns that they will be likely to know more about the users' characters than the users' themselves!
The idea of an Operating System (contrary to most popular current beliefs) will actually be completely immersed into the Google and other similar super-computers, which will never crash, always be on, provide all the current OS-based (and more) services. Users will not have to worry about boot up processes as being on-line will mean that their machines are always accessible and never need a restart in order to update the settings.
Many web-based companies will suffer from these developments as Google will increasingly be monopolising users' on-line time and therefore prevent other web sites from being able to attract more major interest. Users will be encouraged to participate and produce content (for Google) as much as possible. 'Content is king' mantra will become something that pretty much everyone in the developed world will see as a 'must embrace' activity in order to try and make money from Google through their two-way advertising models.
Everyone using Internet will be looking to become some sort of an Internet entrepreneur, aiming to make money by selling something and utilising the web as much as possible in order to achieve as many of their financial aims as possible.
The continuous and increasing price that everyone will be paying for these 'free' services and overall improvements for the global on-line community will be the fact that we will all have to be 'writing off' more and more of our own privacy away to these big super-computer provider corporations, who will be making more and more real-time profits based on our online activities which will, click by click, be improving the bottom line figures of these companies ... exponentially!
What will happen to governments? They will, of course, tune into the overall pool of thoughts, knowledge, opinions and information in order to mine for those matters which they will deem as the most interesting, important and worth finding out about. Google will not have power to abstain from providing governments with the information about its users as the governments will find good enough reasons to claim that they are not braking the information privacy act as the overall government activities will be deemed as 'working on the public safety' matters.
In future, Google's aim will be to do what every big corporation aims to do ... dominate and monopolise as many markets as it possibly can. Considering the fact that pretty much everything in the future will be kept for as long as possible in design (i.e. digital) form, Google will have access to pretty much all the most important matters in the world, be able to organise them using the most powerful algorithms for data, information and knowledge mining known to man. It will become something very close to ultimate truth machine. A machine which will be able to know anything about the past, present and, most importantly, increasingly be able to predict and model the future.
Google will enable some of the most important scientific discoveries and improvements that the world will ever see (as it is already happening now with the DNA project which they are working on), as the processing power coupled with the huge amount of (learnt artificial) knowledge will enable teams of bright engineers and scientists in the company to tackle any possible scientific problem in the leanest and most effective manner possible. Through this power Google will be able to own (or at least partially own) patents on most of the future's scientific discoveries.
Other companies will increasingly 'submit' to the idea of 'free' services used for information processing, storing and any form of manipulation. This will bring Google into the heart of pretty much everything all of us and any of our organisations ever do. Google will be the 'information God' of the planet. It will be a company which will start deciding our lives and influencing them in any way it wants. As our hand held small pocket or head-installable Google information devices will be used, we will become less and less able to determine what is our reality from what is Google and Google's 'set agenda for us'.
