Cringely gets it.
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8 thoughts on “Google Speculation Update”
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Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
I am so tech-deficient that all I get from this is a general sense that Google is doing something very big. (Does this mean that if the UN takes over the Internet, it won’t matter because Google will really run it?)
It means that Google’s search-based business model is, to use the precise technical term, a gold mine, that it scales without apparent limit, and that the people running Google understand this and are expanding their business as rapidly as possible in the areas where it has the biggest advantage.
Neither Google nor the UN will take over the Internet.
He dismisses Akamai pretty quickly, but it’s not clear that this is justified. AKAM has been doing local caching for quite some time, and has presumably developed considerable intellectual capital in this area.
So when will the obligatory lawsuits and conspiracy theories start developing about Google like they did for Walmart? Or is Google exempt because they donate so much money to left of center political causes?
I think Google’s high and growing capitalization confirms that the company knows what it is doing. I don’t know about Akamai.
No idea how long before Google comes under political attack. Probably a matter of time, as it was for Microsoft, though the apparent leftism of Google’s founders may insulate them for a while.
Damn, I better cover that GOOG short!!!
Kidding kidding. Thanks for the article, very interesting reading.
The more bullish I am, the more you should probably sell.
Google is a very innovative company but in a lot of ways they’re really just reinvigorating old technologies. Google has found fantastic ways to manufacture supercomputers that can index and search the internet (and do so many other things) at breath-taking speed. But ultimately it still comes back to that huge computer- and data-center model that’s as old as electronic computing itself. Google has bent the graph to beyond its traditional bounds enough to extend its lifetime, but it’s a model that still has real, fundamental limitations and weaknesses.
Today the biggest collection of computing power is still largerly untapped. The collective power of privately owned consumer computing devices is in the range of many hundreds of thousands of teraflops, easily thousands of times greater than the fastest supercomputers in existence today. And it is mated to an equally impressive amount of non-volatile storage (easily many exabytes). And yet despite that potential the average utilization of this resource is only a few percent. It’s really only a question of when, not if, someone will be able to effectively unleash the power of that resource, with software, and what impact that will have.