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The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software
Infonortics Ltd, Sep 2005, Pages: 280
What kind of company is Google? The world mostly knows this high-flying, publicly traded West Coast company as the upstart that revolutionised search.
Wrong, says Stephen Arnold in this new ebook: Google is much more. New, radical and overlooked, Google is this era's transformational computing platform and could be about to unseat Microsoft from its throne.
Google is not just about search: search is merely one application you can load on its processor. Although Google has been releasing a series of separate application programs, the company is starting to assemble the mosaic pieces into a bigger picture. Its future will be about leveraging its innovative hardware/software infrastructure. In so doing, just as Microsoft replaced IBM, Google promises to replace Microsoft as Network Computing comes of age.
Written for business readers, especially senior executives of mid to large-sized, knowledge-based corporations, The Google Legacy places Google under a microscope, dissects Google's technology, evaluates its potential and determines that Google's future lies beyond search. Three appendices provide lists of Google patents, publishers who have indicated some type of relationship with Google, and universities working with Google-information that, according to the author, Google has sought to keep under wraps.
'. . . At Google, from its inception, Google software and Google hardware have been tightly coupled,' Arnold observes. 'Google is not a software company, nor is it a hardware company. Google is, like IBM, a company that owes its existence to both hardware and software. Unlike IBM, Google has a business model that is advertiser supported. Technically, Google is conceptually closer to IBM (at one time a hardware and software company) than it is to Microsoft (primarily a software company) or Yahoo! (an integrator of multiple softwares).'
Among the book's critical insights:
Google's computing platform -- named the Googleplex by Arnold after the name given by the company to its Mountain View headquarters complex -- is a better (faster, cheaper and simpler to operate) computer processor and operating system than systems now available from competitors. Its price advantage is five or six to one over other hardware. Massively parallelized and distributed, its processing capability can be expanded indefinitely. As a virtual system or network utility, the user simply faces no need for backup or setup or restore.
Google has re-coded Linux to meet its needs. This recoding enables Google to deploy numerous current and future applications -- 50 or more -- without degrading performance.
Google products have the potential to be assembled into a version of MS Office -- including word processing -- and many other applications.
Such insights underpin Arnold's conclusions that if Google can avoid or overcome certain pitfalls and hurdles, 'Google is poised to become the heir to Microsoft'. The author sets out these legal, management and marketing obstacles.
The book also identifies and explains a series of incremental hardware and software innovations 'not fully appreciated by Google's competitors, analysts or users' that have given Google its competitive edge. 'The net of these advantages is that Google does not have a search system. Google has a supercomputer that delivers applications. Some of these applications are free for the user; namely, search. Other applications are for Google's 4,000 employees; namely, the programmers who craft applications for the Googleplex and employees who use the formidable number-crunching capabilities of the Googleplex to figure out what users are doing, how to maximize advertising revenue from billions of online clicks in real time, and improve the search experience.'
What is Google's legacy? Arnold clearly and eloquently defines it at the end of the first chapter. He introduces the subject by posing this question: 'A young programmer in Beijing or Bangkok is influenced by Google. If that programmer wakes up one day and Google has disappeared, for what system will the programmer develop?' Arnold then proceeds to provide the answer.
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