Some futurologists are so plausible you wonder if they know something nobody else does. Alternatively, they are total fantasists. I got that eerie feeling today while reading an article by Robert X Cringely over at PBS.

His thesis? Google is about to take over the Internet (via Web 2.0) using the techniques of Wal-Mart. What are the techniques of Wal-Mart? Pile up cheap boxes all over the place and sell them cheap-cheap-cheap, proclaiming choice-choice-choice. Well, you know what I mean : pile ‘em high and sell ‘em at an empty box price.

What’s this got to do with Google? This is where it gets interesting. Apparently the devilishly “do no evil” duo has an underground car park which very few are permitted to enter. In it they have a very ordinary, and very dull, shipping container ~ one of those big boxes that shippers stack on incredibly boring freight liners.

Inside the container they are piling as much memory and processor power as modern tech will allow. According to the all-knowing frog : “about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig.”

The notion is to plant one of these utilitarian data-centers in places where Google owns access to fiber, “basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”

They then plan to offer all manner of Web-based services which will operate with the speed and efficiency of a desktop app, and have the redundancy and backup to keep the system as resilient as it can be.

“Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. … But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.”

This could be a disaster for Microsoft, especially, “… all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. … And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google. Microsoft can’t compete. Yahoo probably can’t compete. … And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That’s less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year. Game over.”

It’s a stunning scenario. Whether it’s anything more than supposition I can’t say, but it has a feasibility that leans toward “must be true”. After all, if Cringely can dream it up, so can the people at Mountain View, who ARE buying up “dark” fiber, and who are not going to become an ISP. Leaving aside assumptive logic, which joins up dots to reach astonishing conclusions, only something this big would surely interest Google after what has gone before. Owning the online world is an extraordinary prospect.

Microsoft should look to its laurels, and then beyond … and even further than that.

[Via Robert X Cringely]

A general consensus is beginning to emerge in the wake of the leaked memos from Microsoft and the announcements of Windows and Office Live Web services.

Gartner researcher Tim Bittman recently said that Microsoft will end up cannibalizing Windows and Office in an attempt to attack Google on its own turf, the open internet. “It’s not so much about how you’re going to beat Google. It’s more about how you are going to beat the Google model. Microsoft is going to be forced to compete with Google, forced to compete with its own business model.”

Can high-volume, high-margin software compete against high-volume, low-margin advertising? It depends on the size and expectations of the business.

Google began small and used guerrilla tactics to pick off the enemy’s weak points. It still does. Its Desktop search in some ways filled the gap left by the dropping of WinFS from Windows Vista. Google is disruptive. It had to be to make its way in the market.

If Microsoft gets disruptive, who will it disrupt? The guys who hold 90 percent of the most lucrative market : Microsoft. There’s an incestuous, backfiring, autoimmune reaction going on here. A kind of turning-in, like someone arguing against himself in a debate. You can sniff it in the air, like cordite.

Google has one-eighth of Microsoft’s income with one-twentieth of the workforce. Its growth is in the 90s percent, compared to Microsoft’s 6 or 7.

Cringely make the point that advertising will never match Microsoft’s current revenues :

Gates and Ozzie HUGELY over-estimate the role of advertising. This is intentional because it distracts with enthusiasm and plays into current Internet hype. Advertising alone will not be able to support these services, especially if Microsoft benefits from them only tangentially as Ozzie suggests. Remember that for Gates and Ballmer to be happy, Microsoft will have to maintain $2.5 billion per month in revenue and $1.5 billion per month in profit. That’s FIVE TIMES the size of Google without Google’s ad expertise or ad infrastructure. It simply won’t happen.

And the end result? “Once the developers are committed and have made their Microsoft-centric technology investments, Microsoft won’t gain much further, so it will be time for those third parties to start to die. Microsoft will buy 3-4 top players and then introduce knock-off services to kill the rest. The company’s incessant need for revenue growth practically mandates this. It’s this maw against which Microsoft, itself, is powerless.”

Scott Johnson of Feedster believes Microsoft will have to buy up the best Open Source developers to slow down the server-side growth of OSS software. He thinks there’s still some mileage in the Redmond model of the desktop. A positive message could help there, he says.

Maybe Mini-Microsoft is right. Slim it down, break it up and go for innovation and quick turnaround. But didn’t IBM do that after posting the biggest loss in corporate history? Look at them now, contracting by 8 percent a year.

If Microsoft has to adopt the guerrilla tactics of its perceived rival, its returns will be negligible compared to current revenues. In the 1960s the British army faced a massive insurgency in Indonesia. Had they adopted their own guerrilla tactics against an enemy that knew the terrain, they would surely have perished. Instead they calculated that a 15 to 1 numerical superiority was the answer. They drafted in the forces and won.

Lesson for Microsoft : don’t copy the methods of your competitors, do what you do, but do it better.

Scott Johnson, founder and CTO of Feedster.com, has rehearsed an unusual argument about Microsoft on his blog. He believes Bill Gates and Co. can challenge the Open Source movement and protect its proprietary base, despite the fashionable ethos of the times.

His thesis has two parts. The first claims bluntly that Open Source client-side software is clunky and inefficient. It’s nowhere near as good as most proprietary software, including Microsoft’s.

Firefox, the browser of choice for the geek community, is an example he gives. With 20 tabs open, the memory drain is around 125 MB. Delete some tabs and the RAM isn’t freed up as you would expect. Similarly, Open Source software sometimes fails inexplicably :

Thunderbird is an interesting mail client. For me it consistently refuses to send messages if it’s been running too long so I constantly have to exit mail just to send a message. This happens regardless of whether or not I’m using my Feedster mail server or my (cursedly required) Yahoo DSL mail server.

His answer to the problems? He wants Microsoft to make the case for its desktop boldly and with conviction, something along the lines of, “Microsoft Desktop: It Just Works Better.”

The situation is more complex than that, though. Contrary to thick client superiority, the boot is on the other foot server-side. This is where Open Source comes into its own. Here Linux dominates and, thinks Johnson, rightly so. He has built his business (Feedster) on Open Source server software, he says.

If he had left it there, nobody would complain and his post might sink rather than appear on Tech.Memeorandum.com and draw the attention of Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s evangelist blogger.

Instead he throws Microsoft the idea that they should target the best Open Source developers who are “as poor as church mice” and pay them handsomely to join Microsoft. They should hire “someone like John Coggeshall, a buddy and really good member of the PHP community. If you hire John (and John is now a real adult with real cash needs) then you just (minorly) attacked the PHP project at its core.”

Of course, others will replace them, but it will take time for them to get up to speed. In the meantime, “you’re hiring good software engineers anyway ~ why not hire the people who would otherwise compete with you?”

Hmmm, this obviously begs the question that such developers would want to join Microsoft at all. And it suggests a cynical war against the Open Source people, preying on their need for funds, not just to advantage Microsoft, but to deal a substantial blow to the whole movement.

If Scott Johnson built Feedster on Open-Source technology, why would he devise a master plan for Microsoft to hobble the community? Could he be after a job himself?

[Source: FuzzyBlog]