Why Google Will Falter in 2006?

Web search

David Kirkpatrick thinks so, and I strongly agree with him. Yahoo's recent acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us, and the remark that "Yahoo understands the importance of social search", and the latest rumors on community based search, all point towards this. There was an article on /. a long time back on why Amazon and Google should partner up, but it looks like Google very well ignored that. I won't be surprised at all if tomorrow Amazon and Yahoo pool in their user profile data and recommendation systems, and unleash the full power of the global brain upon the world. Surprisingly, the idea of the global brain was first proposed by Douglas Adams in Chapter 29 of the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and corroborated by Scott Adams in God's Debris, and even tried to be put into practice by a handful of companies which unfortunately went bust around the dot com bubble. Just try googling for it. Internet stalwarts had conveniently ignored it so far, but it's only now with the Web 2.0 wave that things are moving towards how they should be.

But there are gaps with what Yahoo, Amazon, and everybody else are thinking about with search. Search is not everything. The vision of the global brain goes beyond that. But I was definitely surprised when I realized yesterday how the global brain tied in with my ideas of an ideal democratic political system.

Anyways, let's examine other points about the article.

Desktop

I will not give up so easily on Google though! Nobody can! We're all in love with it! I haven't followed up very closely on Microsoft's Vista, mainly because there is a lot of activity going on otherwise with the Tenor active desktop in KDE, ReiserFS, Flamenco from UC Berkeley, and most important of all, Google Desktop. Google surely knows that they can take over the entire desktop from Microsoft. Let's see what you need a desktop for anyways. It's just for saving and retrieving files locally, right? Google Desktop's philosophy is, save for all you care, and we will help you retrieve it. The active desktop concept only makes it better with tagging and context awareness, and it can be easily implemented through AJAX components in the web browser that talk to Google Desktop about everything they do! This is what Jason Kottke's vision of the Web OS is all about, and Google might be just implementing it today. My vision is of a single active desktop that will be the Internet browser, email client, file explorer, iTunes store, with Konfabulator like icons to make it look prettier, and VmWare virtualization to package and unpackage your desktop as you move from one endpoint to another. Heck, maybe you won't even have different endpoints 10 years from now - it'll all be thin clients if network bandwidths and computation capabilities keep up with Moore's Law! Maybe this is why Google does not care too much about Yahoo and Amazon. They are already gathering user profile data for personalized search, and now they have google base and the web accelerator for centralization of information too - Go Google Go!

Telcos

Correct again! Please read Keshav's paper on why cellphones (also read, PDAs) are the future of the Internet, and my earlier blog on the future of the Internet. Cisco has been making acquisitions left, right, and center. Their vision is to turn the cable providers into wireless ISPs through WiFi meshes, and make video broadcasting and on-demand video even more cheaper with Scientific-Atlanta settop boxes plugged into wireless APs. I wonder where this will leave TiVo... On the other hand, cellular providers are trying the opposite route with EvDO, UMTS, and WiMax coverage to provide video and other content based services. Both the cellular providers and cable providers are pitted in a battle against each other - let's see where it goes. The WiFi gang seems to have a lead in terms of deployment time for sure, but their life is not going to be so easy with the management of thousands of APs, which is where the cellular providers have an upper hand with the larger footprint of their base stations.