Like lots of people trying to divine the inner workings and possible futures for the search engine, George Colony has some thoughts on the topic.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
“The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world!”
— Pinky and the Brain compete with Google for global dominion
Forrester Research chairman and CEO George Colony sees the future of the Internet led by Google, with the online experience replacing web pages with executable programs (“we call this executable Internet (X Internet)”). A pretty rosy picture of a Google future for the enterprise exists in Colony’s forecast, which was made available today.
The core of Colony’s argument sees the processing of requests for information happening on the desktop or laptop, instead of on the server side. He discusses online banking as an example:
“In the future, when you click on your bank’s site, servers will download a program to your computer, not static pages. Once that program is installed, you will be able to “converse” with your bank, run financial models, analyze your net worth – do much more than you could have with old Web pages.”
Microsoft doesn’t come out very well in Colony’s future, where the X Internet makes the Windows and Office purveyor “an obvious loser,” with Oracle and SAP besieged by the challenges of hosted application providers.
“Vista (formerly Longhorn) had better be fantastic, and Microsoft had better be able to re-spark its culture of derivative innovation,” Colony wrote.
Google’s programming culture gives it an edge here, Colony contended, and he claims that competitors like Amazon, AOL, eBay, and Yahoo don’t know programming like Google does. That’s a viewpoint where Google’s competition will disagree.
It wouldn’t be a Forrester report without a handy list, and Colony gives readers one regarding Google’s possible plans:
So here’s Google’s playbook:
1) have the best search;
2) have more of the world to search than anyone else through the digitization of university libraries, earth images, maps, etc.;
3) attract the most advertising and syndication; enabling the company to
4) give all of its software away for free; which enables it to
5) change the rules and economics of the software business and define the future through its pioneering work in X Internet.
However, the most telling bit of Colony’s forecast came as he discussed his predictions last year about Google: “I was wrong.”
Maybe it isn’t time to dump Microsoft’s stock just yet.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
