Google Chrome, Android, Cloud Computing & My trends

I kick started the year with lot of optimism and hope, especially for the netizens. That’s why I wrote this post on 01-01-2008. Excerpts of that post are down below:

"…On 31st December, 2007 GoogleBlog posted "This year of Google blogging"
which gives a lot of hints about where actually we are heading, not only in tech
space but also about general human psyche. The article contains a small piece on
the posts which captured maximum attention as well as linkbacks from other
bloggers in general. So here what's written in the article...The posts that
elicited the most reaction in terms of views and linkbacks include (courtesy
GoogleBlog):

1) The much-discussed "Gphone" news
2) Our thinking about the upcoming FCC spectrum auction.
3) What the OpenSocial APIs could mean
4) How a black screen might not save energy
5) Announcing the Knol test project
6) Building your own Google homepage

It's very simple to come up with trends for the future. Actually the past always have some clues for the future. So it becomes kind of easy to build upon it. So, looking at the maximum viewed posts, it kind of gave me the key towards the future. The ubiquitous question for every marketer ::What do customers/users want?:: My conclusions from these snippets are based on the point that giving much attention to such posts mean they want to know more about it. So when users want to know more, it becomes apparent for marketers to align their thinking in that direction. So my conclusion would be that "Users need more power, more control & all in all something which is more about THEM i.e. users" which can be in the form of Knol, OpenSocial API's etc.So lets hope 2008 brings optimum coherence between customers/users & marketers.
So, "User Federated Space (UFS)" era is now!!....”

So, come September 2008, it seems we are quite on the track. What interested me in writing this post was the way those developments are taking place. From the above 6 points of my January post, many things get clearer. Though for some, Google is evil & for some Google is God but what Google is can be explained by this small sentence: “they are a freak of a company; the best advertising business ever built is funding the largest collection of mad scientists ever assembled”. Now that's what one of the posts of AVC talks about. Interestingly it also talks about Google’s future trends and how it will shape our lives. Down below is the post:

“…...Google is building a collection of web apps, like gmail, gcal, and google docs, that businesses are increasingly relying on. My personal goal this year is to get our firm completely off of the office suite and into the google suite. As builders of web apps, Google understands that the infrastructure for the deployment and operation of web apps just isn't there yet.

And so they are doing something about it in three important places.

1) They are building a modern browser, Chrome (Point 3 of my trend post above i.e. OpenSocial API's) that resembles an operating system as much as a browser. If you haven't read the Chrome Comic Book, you should do that. It's not that Google wants to build a better version of Internet Explorer or Firefox. They want to build a better environment for running web apps.

2) They are building a mobile operating system, Android (Point 1 of my trend post above i.e. GPhone), which is also designed for running web apps in a mobile environment. I think in time, Google's Android will be to the iPhone what Windows was to the Mac. The iPhone laid out many of the killer mobile device innovations, but it’s a closed device, a closed carrier relationship, and even a closed application store. Android will take all of those good ideas and put them on every device, with every carrier, and in partnership with every app developer. You'd have thought that Apple would have learned the lesson that you can't control the entire ecosystem with the Mac, but they did not.

3) Google is all about the cloud. They have developed all of their apps in what goes for the cloud these days. They've build a great cloud computing platform in App Engine. And they will certainly support other cloud computing environments that emerge. Google's DNA (like Intel's DNA) is about supporting an entire ecosystem. The more web apps that are built, the better Google will do. So they will do anything and everything they can to support the development of a robust cloud computing environment for web apps. It is on this three legged stool (browser, mobile, cloud) that Google's future will be built. And sitting here today, it seems like they are well organized and have a great strategy for doing just that.

Now after 2 random posts (one from my earlier blog & other from AVC), two things becomes quite clear.

1. I was right about the Google’s future trends I covered in January.
2. Secondly, something is more important than me pin pointing the trends. I’m talking about Browser, Mobile & Cloud which is the table stakes for companies to win over potential customers. Now surely Google has identified it but let’s wait and watch who else joins the race so that GooG doesn’t feel too alone.

So what do you think? Where are we heading?