Google has been quietly gunning away at the technology behemoths. Being itself a giant, it makes things easier for Google to take on the might of Microsoft and Apple. Just as recession is ending, Google beat market expectations and grew 7% for Q3 ending, September 2009, as compared to Q3 in 2008. Ad spending, undoubtedly is flooding Google's coffers once again, after a rather grim year of recessionary trend. Google announced a surprise bonus for all employees across its board, as an incentive for their efforts during October 2009.
Riding on the wave of the strong growth, Google, which has always been quietly working at spreading its wings far and wide, is investing more in view of the positive outlook in the economy. Cues such as its aggressive ad campaigning for businesses to adopt its Google Apps services to embrace its enterprise search appliance option are just an indicator. Touted as Gone Google, the marketing campaign is going to be featured in airports, high traffic spots through billboards.
Google, clearly is also pioneering the cloud computing phenomenon, to have any or all softwares hosted in an internet cloud hosted by Google, and accessed by an entire enterprise, rather than store them in separate servers, thus saving costs for big and small organizations alike.
Google's Android open source mobile platform, for mobile phone handsets is just beginning to open up. In what is being touted as the biggest threat to Apple's iPhone yet, Motorola, after being on the wane for almost 2 years in the mobile market, would hope that Droid would change its fortunes. Droid, runs the Google Android software, and will be sold by Verizon Wireless in the U.S. That would mean a 3 way battle through one collaboration : Verizon taking on AT&T; Motorola taking on iPhone; Google taking on Apple itself !
Google Wave is another phenomenon waiting to further cut down distances separating the internet world. Claimed as a real time communication platform, Google Wave is an effort by Google to integrate a multitude of features like email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, video conferencing, project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. The anticipation for Wave to roll out can be gauged by the fact that, there have only been 10,000 or so invites for end users to try the service. So much so, there are invites for Wave being auctioned at eBay !
This is not all. After launching Google Chrome browser last year, Google announced an ambitious plan to launch its own open source Operating System. Christened, Chrome, it is evident Google plans to make this an extension of its browser. The final objective it would seem, is to integrate the internet world through a browser, run the OS within the browser and to draw on the hardware resources of the computer only when needed by the OS. This would mean, more efficient memory usage and better battery life for computer devices. This is where its Cloud Computing could be key.
Clearly, Google has in myriad ways, taken on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, quietly from just being a search engine giant. Google's potential and its undisputed capabilities are only just unfolding. The key aspect to Google's future ambitions would be, how it leverages and grows on its cloud services. That could well result in a truly world wide web weaved by Google.
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