Dinosaurification

When a corporation is described as a dinosaur, it usually means that it has become two big and too slow for it's environment. IBM was an example of this. Trying to treat the PC market as they did the mainframe market, they were outsmarted by the new mammal in town, Microsoft.

Resent news of Google moving into the DNS services marketplace, following up on a new programing language and web protocol,  has me worried that Google is moving towards the same position. Treating anything related to the Internet as one. Those are some of their moves in that direction. The free WiFi gift was another.

These are areas in which Google has an advantage due it's superior data centers and connectivity. They are not the only ones leveraging internally build resources for new markets, consider Amazon's Elastic Cloud and Simple Storage Service. In the same way that Amazon realized that it had to expand beyond a web book store, Google knows it cannot live indefinitely on revenues from adds backed up by it's search engine. While we may mock Rupert Murdoch, the notion that some content will be out of Google's index, while existing in another is problematic for Google.

Reaches into other areas, not directly in the domain of indexing and advertising, such as the Google Apps, make sense. This provides a new source of revenue, does not conflict with the existing business and competes with other companies (namely, Microsoft) in a clear feature per feature fashion. Pushing into the infrastructure of the Internet is another matter.

First and foremost, this has been done before, by AOL, Compuserve and MSN. Those types of ISP did failed not so much due to their lack of resources, but more do to the limited accesses they provided to content. This also had to with resources, as they tried to handle both the connectivity and the content. 

Secondly, this Google infrastructure, now including a browser, a phone and an OS, will seem tainted towards Google indexed data. Even when Google does, yet, host it's own data. Considering the issues with the Google book scans, it is likely that any further attempt by Google to actually store data will be met with a less then friendly eye.

I am worried, because I do believe that Google does believe in it's own motto. They do have some superior technologies beyond search and index, and they bring them out into the open when they believe they are worth using, or at least evaluating. They do get confused when this technology is used for evil.

Google is big now. Very big. I just hope it does not get so big as to not noticing when it will start stomping on the mammals around it.