Like the Boggart, Google takes many scary shapes
"Danger is the spur of all great minds."
George Chapman
Google's name keeps popping up all over the place and in conjunction with all kinds of projects and stratagems, most recently with a proposed free Wi-Fi network for the city of San Francisco, a joint research effort with NASA and a new partnership with Sun Microsystems.
These days, Google is something akin to the alien in "The Thing," seeming to take the shape - if not the personality - of whatever hosts it can infect. Google is a media company. It's a telecom provider. It's the next Microsoft.
Actually, a better analogy would be to the Boggart, a creature in the Harry Potter novels that takes the shape of whatever the viewer fears the most. But "The Thing" reference lets me gently recommend, as we approach Halloween, that you check out John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the story. It's the rare horror movie that is actually scary.
All this hubbub is quite remarkable because Google is so tight-lipped about what its long-term strategy actually is. The company does a wonderful job of dancing around the growing industry speculation about its plans, enjoying the limelight while refusing to be pinned down. (Much like a great horror movie director - say, Ridley Scott with "Alien" - Google only teases the audience with a glimpse of the ghost or ghoul, letting the viewers' own imaginations fill in the blanks and building the intrigue and suspense.)
Nowhere was this technique more apparent than in this week's joint announcement with Sun. The pundits and analysts were drooling in anticipation, expecting the Google/Sun confab to be jumping off point for the first wave of a massive assault on Microsoft. But what we got was pretty tepid fare. Sun will include the Google toolbar as an option for consumers downloading the Java Runtime Environment and the two will jointly promote the OpenOffice open source productivity suite. Yawn.
That's hardly what people itching for a Google/Microsoft tussle were hoping to hear. It was anticipated that Sun and Google would announce plans to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by, for example, providing consumers with a network-based application suite to compete with the expensive, monolithic Office. (Given that OpenOffice is actually a more traditional, desktop-based offering that would have been a tall order. See those two good stories on the Sun/Google announcement and on Google's software aspirations: here and here.)
But it would be a mistake to be misled by the seeking innocuousness of the partnership. Google and Sun are among the strongest champions of the network-based app concept and this initial photo-opp was the equivalent of the Soviet Union stealthily placing nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Google CEO - and former Sun CTO - Eric Schmidt said of Tuesday's joint briefing that, viewed in one light, "we're not announcing anything." Sun CEO Scott McNealy, licking his lips and grinning, said: "You can speculate all day long on how we can work together and they are all legitimate speculations, but we can only talk about what you are hearing today." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Your wife sir, is she a goer?
Bill Gates, like John Kennedy, cannot like what he sees, and you and I, out in the audience, can only wait eagerly for the director to reveal the next glimpse of the monster.
Those of you attending Vortex 05, which is only a couple of weeks hence, will get glimpses sooner than most. I'll be interviewing Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos and Google's top IT executive Dr. Douglas Merrill and you can be sure that I'll try to haul the monster out of the closet. (If you're a procrastinator, you shouldn't wait much longer to sign up. Go here to sign up.)
As always, I'd love your thoughts on what's behind the curtain. What is the long-term plan at Google? Who's most at risk? Share with me here.
Bye for now.
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