http://www.detnews.com/2005/technology/0509/25/A25-325993.htmI can find at least a hundred other stories about some facet of google. From the rumors of the secondary internet that google is building between its datacenters, to google TV, to google's desire to internet-enable the text of every book ever written, to some of the concerns in the article above.
For years, we've all lambasted Microsoft as the evil empire, but in the end analysis, I don't think MS will hold a candle to what we're going to be seeing out of google. I'm not completely convinced that google is evil, but the perfect storm of capitalism, the Internet and hundreds of geniuses on staff certainly leave the door open for google to "turn against us".
Consider this - google is not a search engine company, or a chat company, or a free email provider. No, they are a marketing company. Their competition is Time Warner, Disney, etc. Google started by building a highly trusted search engine and then leveraged its ubiquitous advertising system to make money. Google is forging new ground in Internet advertising, and I think we've only seen the start of what's to come. For example, google earth, gmail, google talk, and soon google tv, and google's new free wireless internet service all appear to be money sinks. Money sinks in the same way that their search engine was a money sink in the early days, but now drives a tremendous amount of ad revenue.
There is, of course, the question of how increasingly damaging google can become as they refine their data delivery systems, like their search engine and google earth. We can find example after example after example of google's search engine being leveraged for "bad". Google's search engine indexes pages that weren't intended to be viewed by "outsiders", the search engine is regularly used by worms to intelligently find web sites that are running vulnerable software. And on and on. The destiny of the internet and of the information age that we're in is toward more and more intelligent organization of data into real information, and information into meta information. It is a scary thought that someone will be able to type in two or three things that they know about me and be able to find just about everything about me, including a satellite picture of my back yard. Google is out in the front of this advancement, so they will be the ones that bear the brunt of the blame as new ways to use the highly organized information are discovered.
Anyway, I was just thinking about what headlines we're going to be reading about google in 3 to 5 years, and it's probably not going to be pleasant. Am I crazy?
