04/ 7/2004

The future OS of Google

Post @ 14:23 in Search Engines

Google released a new free email system, Gmail. It's a really hot topic had been talked over the blog and internet. Gmail with the 1GB of storage really had sparked the flame. Rich Skrenta had a great post with in-depth perspective in Google, I was really trilled in the last paragraphs.

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

Jason (from Kottke) also posts his personal opinion after reading Scrota's post. He predict: Google will be the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years. How to imagine that in the future Google providing their service not only a search engine or Mail service, but also a smart operating system with handy interface, even a build-in Google powered office applications?