What is Google Building?

Dare Obasanjo wonders what is google building?

It’s been interesting chatting in the hallways with folks contemplating what Google would want to build that requires folks with a background in building XML data access technologies both on the client side, Internet Explorer and on the server, BEA’s WebLogic.

I think it’s probably one of the most interesting questions in the entire tech industry right now. It certainly fascinates me! Google has demonstrated an absolutely remarkable ability to build unique, high-impact technologies for the web. Everything about Google is astonishing. Just look at how they tackled their infrastructure needs! Current operating systems didn’t do what Google wanted, so they invented their own with a custom distributed file system, global shared memory, complete system redundancy, and who knows what else. The “Google Supercomputer” has been referred to as the secret source of google’s power by a few people now, yetI think people/analysts still don’t appreciate the competitive advantage this level of operating system expertise gives Google. There’s no way anyone else out there has the ability, or even the courage, to tackle these difficult challenges - Microsoft will try to build all of their stuff on Windows. They have to, or what kind of message would they be sending their developers and customers? Google’s OS team only has one customer: Google. Other players (Yahoo!, Technorati, etc.) will stick with whatever they can get in Linux, BSD, or Solaris. Nobody else will have most of the world’s brightest computer “rocket scientists” hard at work building what amounts to Google OS(tm).

My bet: The fact that Microsoft is primarily an operating system vendor will be a massive liability in the upcoming war of rich-client vs. web app.

Dare also points out that Google has also managed to hire a couple big-name Java developers, including Joshua Bloch (one of the most influential people at Sun next to Gosling himself in terms of bringing new features into the Java language) and some Java compiler experts. Back to the original question: What is Google building? It seems obvious to me, and to Jon Udell that Google is betting the company on doing things with web applications that Microsoft — in contrast — is betting the company that you’ll have to use rich win32 applications for.

Google’s IPO documents make it clear that they really see one large competitor: Microsoft. I think Google is executing some very deliberate, very careful attacks on Microsoft. They see an opportunity here, one that could go down in the history books as a cosmic mistep by Microsoft to retrench around the rich client. Google will attempt to redefine what you can do with a web application, which mean one of the first steps will have to be an attack on Internet Explorer as the decacto “web platform”. IE simply has to be de-throned if the assault on the rich client is going to be successful - Microsoft will not willingly allow IE to progress, since it threatens their Windows API business. With Firefox approaching prime-time readiness, I suspect you’ll see the first volley fired. GMail will work better in non-IE browsers. Not that GMail will be artificially encumbered on IE, just that some of the cooler things you can do in modern browsers with CSS2 and XHTML aren’t possible in IE. GMail could single handidly bring the browser wars to the forefront of the average person’s web experience, and end the era of IE dominance. Wouldn’t that be something?