Google facinates me. Their corporate culture and way of doing business is unique, the freedoms employees are given at work are unqiue, and the products that Google develops are the most unique and useful found anywhere on the Net.
A few months back, I wrote a little bit about Google’s evolution, and how they might continue to evolve. At time, Google Desktop 2 & Google Talk were new. Picasa, Google Maps, Google Earth and Picasa had been released earlier.
Today has been another day of speculation for just what Google will do next.
In the past few months, Google has experimented with free Wi-Fi near their Californa HQ. Google has also buying back dark fiber all around the country. Many people are speculating that these moves will make Google an Internet Service Provider (ISP), offering free (advertisment-based) wireless internet nationally.
There has been talk of a free Office system – Google Office – that would target and compete with the Microsoft Office suite of programs. Google & Sun Microsystems are collaborating to try and bring Sun’s StarOffice to Google users.
Today’s newest rumour is that of a small, cheap, Google-OS based PC called “Google Cubes”, which will be sold through Wal-Mart to bring affordable PC boxes to the end user. The computer would not run on a Microsoft platform, thus driving down the cost of the PC by hundreds of dollars.
How much is true? No one but Larry & Sergey. What is true is that Google is a company that is not standing still at all, waiting for consumers to demand more out of a company for products & services. No no, quite the contrary here. Google is often beating the consumer to the punch, delivering a service or product before the consumer even realizes a need for it. The end user is the winning party here, with a dozzen or so (or more) free services from Google that truly shape the Internet we use today. No other company comes to my mind right now that works like this, and that’s a good thing.
For a look at what the Internet started off as (like back when you had to explain to people what the Internet was), take a look at this video clip. This is a 7 min video clip about “Internet”, circa early 1980s.