Google as Berkshire Hathaway
What if Google never split its stock? Right now, there are analysts who see it going to 600. Today it's at 442. What does Google care if it never splits the stock? What are the chances that a stock that's up around 1000 falls to 500? Does a stock price influence buying? I think so.
I just had a thought about what Google might do. Maybe Cringely's stuff is just getting through my thick skull. What I imagine is that Google will decide to be the single huge global operating system. The more you compute, the more Google grows. Google is trying to be the best IT system on the planet. It has very strict rules about its APIs and it picks the best ones and publishes them.
Google as planetary IT reminds me of another old idea of mine. Back in 95 or so, when online banking was first getting started, I thought it would be a great idea for banks to become data trustees. This was back in the day when disk drives were all we had, and Iomega was considered the best possibility for backup. FWB had the best drives, outside of Seagate and people were just beginning to take the word 'terabyte' seriously. How it is that I ended up with my own terabyte of data is a long story, but I am increasingly taking advantage of websites like Flickr. But I'll tell you what, as soon as I can save all my MP3s and JPGs up on a Google service, you better bet I will.
That means my Google ID is becoming more and more important to me, even though I don't use Orkut any longer. Which brings me to another point. Yeah it's cool that I have a Pay Pal Card, but what about a Google ID card? To what extent does and will the public trust IT companies to manage things better than banks? If you think about it, banks have, in their own way had their authentication practices upstaged by those of internet and other providers. If you own a domain, for example, there is a much more complicated set of authentications than are required by banks. So will Google get into the identity business? It seems inevitable that they will. So what are the possibilities that certain transactions within a Google account are made as secure as those of say, Pay Pal? Ultimately, for people to trust Google and their Google identity, this must be guaranteed.
I like the idea of a private company with access to the security experts in the field being responsive to such information. Sure some people will get nervous about having 'all that information about me' cross-referenceable. We may never know if Google is hacked by the Feds for this information, but we'll trust Google first.
Google Enterprise
I wonder if and when Google might venture into large scale computing for enterprise applications. You see this is a place that very few corporations have gone. We all know they keep outsourcing their application builders and designers, a trade-off in quality for expediency and cost savings. I believe that Google has learned lessons building general purpose super-scalable applications that no IT departments have yet learned and that the biggest DB software companies like Oracle and Teradata believe only they know. That is the top of commercial computing, and I'm thinking of ways to get there. The ease with which Google is mastering application rollouts is fairly astonishing. It's something nobody else is doing. Their partnerships with Sun and AOL could mean business, and the idea of the Google Box means that all things are possible.
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