Google’s strategy
Their strategy is clear. Namely to focus as much activity as possible to the lnternet. That is where they earn their money. Just one more example is how they intend to solve the equivalent of Apple’s successful concept with Apps. For their Android, is of course the downloads directly from the Internet searchable as everything else.
I must admit that most of what they developed, appeals to me and with no other account than my own cost, efficiency and usability, they are fantastic.
But we are facing a fairly common problem, but now in an ever larger scale. Namely, that they sweep aside all competition.
Within the Automotive business we are very aware of how tough competition makes us sharper, leaner, faster and better in all our processes. It would never happen without compteition.
Google have become even more dominant than what Microsoft was in the past and what IBM was before them. IBM dominated the business side. There was no PC:s then. Microsoft took over and dominated the PC market totally on the consumer-side and eventually much of the business side. Google takes over not only the Internet but in many other adjacent areas.Still, there are dragons like Microsoft and Yahoo trying to challenge. But for how long?
What kind of Google, we will see where all competition is gone? What are they doing with all the information they have on us? Will it only be used for targeted advertising? Could there be a hidden agenda? The questions are piling up …
Finally, who will challenge Google?
Right now no one…
When Microsoft was dominant, no one thought they could be challenged either. What happened was not that they were challenged, but that they were slowly becoming obsolete as OS began to matter less and web more, just as local apps matter less and web apps more. Google filled this void and became the new place were the smartest programmers wanted to work.
The next Google will not challenge them, but conquer a new frontier. I don’t know what that frontier will be, since Google are already strong on, for example, the mobile web.
Two guesses:
1) An OS for home robotics.
When/if humanoid robots invade our homes, it will be beneficial if the software that runs the hardware is standardized across robots. What you want is a universal app store (quite like the one on iPhone) for adding capabilities to your robots.
A robotic OS would need both drivers for common hardware and high-level libraries for walking, image processing, speech recognition, etc, so that the apps have a solid common ground to build on.
2) Artificial General Intelligence
A company like Ben Goertzel’s http://www.novamente.com or Jeff Hakwin’s http://www.numenta.com will some day achieve general intelligence. Since general intelligence is… general.. in nature, it will be applicable to an enormous variety of problems, and the one to get there first will probable be huge.
i have tested chrome os both at home and at work, it does not seem to be better than ubuntu.-.