The Google Guys (20 page)

So Larry pointed out one such application and told Schmidt about all the opportunities it represented for the future. Schmidt was impressed with his thinking and scheduled a meeting for the following day to discuss the potential. “The meeting happened because Larry and I were thinking similarly, but he was thinking with better specificity. I was just generally complaining.”

That's a big part of the reason that the number of services Google offers grows constantly. Although management insists that it's still primarily a search company, outsiders, including Wall Street analysts, see what appears to be a scattershot diversification. There are, however, specific targets in mind. Larry and Sergey are focused on all the possibilities of the Internet, and many others besides. Many of their efforts are designed to fill in spaces they feel are not being filled properly, and they're very fond of showing others what they believe is the right approach. Says Stanford president and Google board member John Hennessy, “Larry and Sergey have very broad and eclectic interests.”

Those interests are especially strong when it comes to getting people online so they can use Google's services, and coming up with new ways to gather information for people to search through, from e-mail to news to people's own documents.

Increasingly, Google is looking like a media company. In 2006 it paid $1.6 billion to buy YouTube, the world's leading supplier of online video. People post homemade videos, pieces of television programs, TV commercials, and anything else that strikes their fancy. But that's the key difference between Google and a traditional media company. Google does not create its own video content. It merely provides the means for others to create content and distribute it through Google's services. It's another effort to build the world's greatest online library.

Nevertheless, YouTube has gotten Google into a cauldron of trouble. Soon after Google bought YouTube in 2006, Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube and Google for allowing users to post copyright-protected videos on the site.

That suit is still crawling through the courts. In October 2008, Viacom issued a statement that said, essentially, if Google can settle with book publishers, it can do the same with Hollywood. “Copyright laws provide creators with the incentive to create the works consumers crave,” said the statement. “It is unfortunate that the publishers had to spend years, and millions of dollars, for Google to honor that principle. We hope that Google avoids the wasted effort and comes more quickly to respect movies and television programming.”

These days, such videos regularly disappear as soon as they're posted, as Google complies with demands from the programs' producers. But just as quickly, they reappear, posted by someone else. It's an ongoing battle, in which Larry and Sergey firmly believe they are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996, which says that Internet service providers (ISPs) are not liable for illegal postings by others using their services, as long as the operators remove infringing content and do not induce users to upload those postings.

So why get involved in video distribution in the first place? There are two reasons. For one, it's a huge business that promises to give Google more places to park ads. The other is that it really does affect Google's ability to improve search.

Google does not have access to all the world's information—yet. Just as they want to digitize books so people can search through them, Larry and Sergey want to ensure that there is a large pool of video content to search through, too. That is not an easy task. The future of search is much more complex, more three-dimensional. It involves the ability to search through images, sound, music, time, and space. Google is experimenting with ways to parse any type of information so that it can be recognized and found. The easiest approach, searching through the labels applied to pictures and sounds, is extremely limited. Google needs to be able to capture words, recognize their meaning, and put them into the search index.

This is also the reason Google bought Picasa, a picturesharing site that also allows people to edit and manipulate their photos. Its research is still secret, but many other researchers are experimenting with techniques to automatically search for and identify photographs. At Stanford, researchers have been trying to identify the content of photographs by recognizing whether they include faces, or the blue skies and green grass of landscapes. Today's cameras also capture the dates and times that images were taken, and one day it may even be possible to use global positioning satellites to determine where a picture was taken. Through Picasa, Google will have access to that data.

It's also very important that Google can observe how people use different types of information. Everything someone posts online says something about him: his interests, opinions, likes and dislikes. By integrating people's data from many different sources, Google's computers collect what's known as metadata, a powerful tool for improving its products and presence on the Internet.

Metadata can come from almost anywhere. While they're at it, how about adding everyone's personal content to the Internet? This means e-mails, spreadsheets, documents, and other products of individual creativity. The goal is primarily to make each individual's information available to her, to keep it from unwanted prying eyes and ears, but also to share it if she wishes. Every piece of data says something about the individual using it, allowing Google to further customize searches to that individual's needs. And if people are using Google products to create that information, it's easier for the company to analyze it, categorize it, and add it to the reams of metadata it has access to. When people use Google's applications programs, such as Google Docs, the company has free access to the information (although it promises to use that info only for the creator's benefit).

This category also pits Google against one of the most powerful technology companies of all time. Microsoft sees Google as an infiltrator into its core business, and is trying to respond in kind. The two companies have started an aggressive dance around each other's business. So far, Google is steadily gaining ground on Microsoft, whose efforts to have an impact on search and online advertising can best be described as luke-cold.

It's easy to say that Google is entering Microsoft's business in order to counterattack Redmond's forays into search and advertising. There is some truth to that, although Google executives all deny it, sometimes credibly. Says Dave Girouard, who heads Google's applications business, “It's not in the DNA of Google. Not that we're not competitive, but I don't think people at Google would ever see this as going after Microsoft. But it's a pleasant side effect.”

But there is another temptation Larry and Sergey cannot resist. The computer industry is once again cracking at the seams, showing its inefficiencies and becoming too expensive—just as it did at the end of the mainframe era. Companies such as Google, Salesforce, and Zoho, a division of software company AdventNet Inc., are using the Internet to make computing more efficient, more powerful, and cheaper. The programs and data no longer reside in the PC, but online—in Google's case, as part of its supernetwork. People tap into these applications through the Internet. The Internet is becoming the computer.

This trend is known as “software as a service” (SaaS) or “cloud computing.” Software is not sold and installed in personal computers; it's run online in the amorphous Internet cloud, and rented or given away to users. The data can also be stored in the cloud.

It's a reversal of the trend that Bill Gates exploited to make Microsoft famous. Before the invention of the microprocessor, only corporations could afford computers. The work was done on large mainframes that employees tapped into through private networks. But mainframes and their networks were easily overloaded if too many people tried to use them at once. After Intel invented the microprocessor in the late 1970s, putting most of the brains of a computer (albeit a very small one) onto a desktop PC, people no longer needed to rely on infinitely more expensive mainframes.

The Internet offers a huge benefit to even simple computing. Today, PCs are relatively expensive. A decently equipped new computer starts at about $1,000. They become obsolete after a few years. Adding too many applications causes internal communications problems as different programs try to access the same channels. Memory chips get full and slow down. People end up trashing them for a new generation of computers with better processors, more memory, and even bigger and more complex software. They spend another $1,000.

But imagine a PC designed for cloud computing. The software runs on Google's supernetwork, so the PC does not need the latest microprocessors. The data is stored in the cloud, so the PC does not need the most expensive memory chips. The software is automatically updated, debugged, and improved remotely by Google. Under this scenario, PCs become much cheaper; the software, free (as long as you're willing to live with a few ads); and obsolescence is slowed immensely. Fully realizing this vision will take some time, because it requires constant access to high-speed Internet connections that do not crash.

But for years Internet bloggers and analysts have repeated rumors that Google is creating its own PC operating system. It's generally seen as an unwise attempt to undercut Microsoft. But it would also increase Google's presence in our lives, and its access to our data, enormously. It makes sense for Google to do it.

Several bloggers have speculated that Google could adapt its Android smartphone operating system specifically for PCs and team up with PC makers to create the hardware. Some companies are already pushing the idea. A Motorola spinoff called Freescale recently announced it is developing a chipset to run Google's Android smartphone operating system on “netbooks.” These pared-down $200 notebook computers, designed for Web surfing, are rapidly becoming the next major trend in computing. And a company called Quickoffice has announced it is creating software that will allow people to view Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications on their Android phones.

Google has even teamed up with Microsoft to take on Apple's iPhone. It's using Microsoft's ActiveSync technology for a new utility called Google Sync, which allows people to synchronize their data from Google Calendar and Google Contact over the air with their iPhone. Apple charges $100 a year for that service.

On a lesser scale, rumors have discussed a supposed secret project within Google code-named Platypus, also known as the GDrive. Leaked documents indicate that Google is trying the system internally. GDrive is more than a memory device. Users can upload the entire contents of their computer to Google's cloud, including all the data and software applications they use. Whenever that person is online, everything is automatically synchronized. Any data added either to the PC or the cloud is updated on the other device as well. The big advantage is this: you can drop your computer in the bathtub and completely destroy it, a disaster for most people. But with this system, you merely buy a new computer, connect to your personal GDrive with your password, and your old computer is reborn in a new shell.

Google denies all rumors, right up until the time it announces a product. For years there were rumors that Google was getting into the phone business with its own smartphone. Technically, the rumors were not quite accurate. Google created an operating system to control a cell phone, and in late 2008, cell phone manufacturer HTC announced it was building the hardware, while T-Mobile announced that the phone would work on its cellular network.

Google has already created a lesser version of the GDrive, a product called Google Gears. This program does not copy an entire PC, but it does copy all the documents users create, either on their PCs or online using Google Docs. When new documents are created or updated, the system is supposed to automatically update those documents either on the PC or online. It's still buggy, though, and does not update reliably.

Not all the products these days are created in-house. Increasingly, Google is buying promising small companies with good ideas, a presence in a business Google covets, or technology that can enhance its own products. Google has acquired more than fifty companies to fill those needs, including blogging services, photo sharing and editing programs, e-mail, Maps, Google Earth, Web browsers, mobile phone applications, and analytical software to help run a business.

A recent article in
Forbes
magazine put it well. Google's goal is to leverage the vast resources of the Internet to put together “little bits on an unimaginable scale.” With that approach, Google is unquestionably displacing Microsoft as the center of the computer industry. Microsoft's model is PC-centric, while Google's is Internet-centric.

There is, of course, room both for PCs operating independently and for cloud computing, but Microsoft places the emphasis on the former, with the Internet as a peripheral system, while to Google, the cloud is the computer. There are merits to both approaches. Microsoft's is more expensive for consumers, while Google's has a higher risk of network crashes shutting down access to one's programs and data.

Google executives have long said that they are not trying to compete directly with Microsoft. “We try not to focus on what they [Microsoft] are doing,” says Larry. But it seems to work out that way. In February 2007, Google moved from being primarily a consumer products company to entering the enterprise software field, creating products for corporations, a field now dominated by Microsoft.
Salesforce.com
has pointed the way with a cloud computing system that displaces corporate software from Oracle, normally run on company mainframes or mini-computers. Google's group is headed by David Girouard, president of the enterprise business and Google Applications. A Dartmouth grad in computer engineering with an MBA from the University of Michigan, Girouard has been a consultant with business consulting firms Booz Allen and Accenture, an executive at Apple, and an entrepreneur. He joined Google in 2004. He says that putting Google's software into corporations and getting them to run programs online is another way to collect all the world's information, although this information is in the restricted access section of the Internet library, available only to the corporations that own it. “A lot of the world's information is in e-mail, in filing cabinets, in the workplace. It's an acute part of what limits people's access to information. Web content per se was never how we defined ourselves.”