Google and the future of the PC
Mark Cuban can be a bit of a jerk when it comes to sports, but his grasp of technology is quite solid. In a post today about the future of personal computing, he speculates about the (very real, in my opinion) possibility of a Google OS, and during his meanderings, makes this point:
Google can put some beautiful HD content out on their servers, and it will be perfect.. until it gets to the peering points, at which point it loses all its priority and becomes just another packet. Which is the downside of net neutrality. Google can’t buy their way to having their packets given priority, so those who expect big bandwidth video to the home from Google Video… as both Google and I mentioned in this post, it aint gonna happen the way things stand today.
So how long until Google gets into the broadband ISP market? It seems like the next logical step in the progression. Provide online alternatives to the most common desktop apps, attempt to become the number one information storage and retrieval provider, and then make the connection directly to the consumers’ homes — and here’s where Cuban’s speculation comes in — and give your data packets higher priority. Don’t disrupt your customers’ gaming sessions or streaming internet radio, but when they want to watch a YouTube video, make sure it plays smoothly without interruption if at all possible. By encouraging its broadband customers to use the Google services (because they’re faster and more responsive) you can increase ad-views and pass the profit along as decreased broadband costs to the subscribers.
I can easily see a point in the near future where starting your computer means booting into a Firefox-based desktop environment, where very little of your data is stored locally — heck, base the system on a few high-capacity flash memory chips, decreasing the power consumption and size and startup time — and practically everything you want to accomplish can be done online — hopefully, for safety’s sake, encrypted and securely. (If you haven’t seen YouOS, it’s a big step in this direction.)
While Google’s evilness is up for debate, for the most part they seem to be doing things right. I’m not quite ready to give up my Linux and local storage, but I can easily see a point in the future where I could be.
