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Friday, January 13, 2006

Google Apocalypse

In the title of this piece, I use the word “apocalypse” in its original sense—a prophecy (or, as we've come to say in this mundane, disenchanted world, forecast). However, readers with paranoid tendencies who ponder the privacy and potential monopolistic consequences of what I'm about to discuss may see them as apocalyptic in the more common sense of the word.

A lot of people have been speculating about “where Google are going”. Some expected one or more stunning announcements at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), but that didn't happen, so the floor is still open for hunches and hypotheses. What follows is mine—I'm far from the first to come up with this idea, but I have, quite recently, become convinced that this is what Google are up to (or, if it isn't, where they ought to be heading, in my humble estimation). I have no inside information, nor any particular expertise in business forecasting (I am, you'll recall, the guy who predicted Microsoft had peaked in 1997). I don't have an MBA, but I have been called an MBO—master of the bloody obvious; if you consider what follows as obvious as it seems to me, that just might indicate it's a plausible scenario.

Imagine if, five or seven years from now, you can buy a Google logo PC from any of a long list of vendors for about US$100. When you turn it on it instantly boots a FreeBSD-derived OS from flash memory (no moving parts in the box at all) and launches the browser which connects to Google and shows your login screen. You log in, and all of your files, mail, and state are there, safely replicated on Google's servers around the world on all that dark fibre, served from the buildings they're buying near major peering points. You can, of course, log in from any browser in the world and see the same view of your state. (This is, of course, just the “thin client” scheme with Google as the monopolistic global server, leveraged with broadband.)

JavaScript/AJAX client programs in the browser communicating with the Google server farm will provide the full functionality of all applications now in Microsoft Office plus, of course, the search and context lookup you expect from Google. Google Mail is simply the first of these applications to launch, and it works quite well.

Google will provide the same privacy guarantees for user documents as they do for mail. Do you recall the howls when Gmail was announced? Have you noticed that many of the very same people who howled the loudest are among the early adopters of Gmail? Besides, a lot of people will say, “Hey, I feel a lot more secure with my data on Google's servers than on a fragile, rarely backed up Windows PC which can be infected with the keylogger and spyware du jour!”.

Of course, security conscious users (government agencies, lawyers, conspiracy theorists, etc.) will not accept losing control over the storage of their data. So Google will sell them Google server software which will run on their own Intranet servers and interface with the same browser clients (which everybody in the world will be trained on) just as if they were using the public service. Google are already doing precisely this with their search engine.

Did I mention that there is not a single Microsoft product anywhere in the loop here? Now does it make sense that Steve Ballmer is obsessed with “crushing Google”?

The only people who will need a machine with lots of local processing power are the lamers who play kiddie video games. They can continue to buy Windows machines and simply run the Google suite in a browser. But why will PC manufacturers pre-load Windows when 90% of their customers don't need it any more?

Posted at 21:55 Permalink

Reading List: South Park Conservatives

Anderson, Brian C. South Park Conservatives. Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2005. ISBN 0-89526-019-0.
Who would have imagined that the advent of “new media”—not just the Internet, but also AM radio after having been freed of the shackles of the “fairness doctrine”, cable television, with its proliferation of channels and the advent of “narrowcasting”, along with the venerable old media of stand-up comedy, cartoon series, and square old books would end up being dominated by conservatives and libertarians? Certainly not the greybeards atop the media pyramid who believed they set the agenda for public discourse and are now aghast to discover that the “people power” they always gave lip service to means just that—the people, not they, actually have the power, and there's nothing they can do to get it back into their own hands.

This book chronicles the conservative new media revolution of the past decade. There's nothing about the new media in themselves which has made it a conservative revolution—it's simply that it occurred in a society in which, at the outset, the media were dominated by an elite which were in the thrall of a collectivist ideology which had little or no traction outside the imperial districts from which they declaimed, while the audience they were haranguing had different beliefs entirely which, when they found media which spoke to them, immediately started to listen and tuned out the well-groomed, dulcet-voiced, insipid propagandists of the conventional wisdom.

One need only glance at the cratering audience figures for the old media—left-wing urban newspapers, television network news, and “mainstream” news-magazines to see the extent to which they are being shunned. The audience abandoning them is discovering the new media: Web sites, blogs, cable news, talk radio, which (if one follows a broad enough selection), gives a sense of what is actually going on in the world, as opposed to what the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post decide merits appearing on the front page.

Of course, the new media aren't perfect, but they are diverse—which is doubtless why collectivist partisans of coercive consensus so detest them. Some conservatives may be dismayed by the vulgarity of South Park (I'll confess; I'm a big fan), but we partisans of civilisation would be well advised to party down together under a broad and expansive tent. Otherwise, the bastards might kill Kenny with a rocket widget ball.

Posted at 03:32 Permalink