A rich and extremely secretive multinational megacorporation is planning to take over the world, according to the man who goes by the stage name of Robert Cringely:
We won't know if we're accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won't matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won't be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined -- about $1 trillion in all -- which places today's $500 Google share price about eight times too low.
Cringely specialises in adding two and two and getting at least 17.94. In this case, the sum includes Google's control of vast amounts of communications network fibre and its strategy of building lots of huge data centres next to sources of cheap power. This is necessary, says Cringely, so that Google can supply us all with the 3GB (or whatever) of downloads we'll need per day, instead of the 3GB we use per month. Or whatever. We don't need to mention Skynet, do we?
The column belongs to the great tradition of "And tomorrow, the world" stories that always used to be about IBM or AT&T, and later were about Microsoft. Among today's monopolies, Google is starting to approach "best fit". It's all good fun, as long as you don't take it too seriously.
