To paraphrase a movie line, “INFINITE COSMIC STORAGE! Itty bitty living space.” This is what the kids at Google see in the future. On Friday, Google sponsored their Analyst Day and they offered some new analysis on this very topic.
Greg Linden of the “Geeking With Greg” posted some interesting comments regarding a few slides in the power point presentation. While the PPT is no longer available, a pdf format version is available.
He said on his blog:
Slide 31 says that Google’s philosophy to new product development is “no constraints” and that they initially ignore “CPU power, storage, bandwidth, and monetization.”
Slide 20 says (in the notes) that Google plans to “get all the worlds information, not just some.”
And slide 19 (in the notes) talks about how their work is inspired by the idea of “a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power.” They say that “the experience should really be instantaneous”. They say that they should be able to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)” which leads to a world where “the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache”. And, they say that they want “transparent personalization” that uses user “data to transparently optimize the user’s experience … implicitly.”
The big question though remains: How will Google make money on this deal? Garett Rogers, one of the many quality bloggers over at ZDNet also had some comments addressing this very issue:
The question of course is how Google will monetize a service like this. I cannot see how file storage using a network share could be used to serve up advertisements – so maybe they won’t. In some screenshots of Gmail for domains, it appears there are different “account plans” that I assume provide additional email addresses. Could a similar system work for online storage? For example, 1GB free and pay $5 for each additional.
There are other questions to be asked too. One question remains security. While online ventures in the “Web 2.0” world continue to grow, security remains a major issue. How can companies like Google guarantee the safety of all this data?
Also something to consider will be the overhead cost involved. As the telecoms gear up to start charging companies like Google for use of their networks, how will this change the dynamic of this type of venture. Uploading and downloading information even more than before would certainly add traffic because one must assume that in some cases, the files going on to these networks will be quite large.
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John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
